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How to type French on an English keyboard

  Tags: Keyboard | French
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3  Next >>
WANNABEAFREAK
Diglot
Senior Member
Hong Kong
cantonese.hk
Joined 6826 days ago

144 posts - 185 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: English*, Cantonese
Studies: French

 
 Message 1 of 19
02 January 2010 at 4:38am | IP Logged 
I have an English keyboard. How do you easily type French characters quickly without going to character map in Microsoft Word and copy/paste them?
1 person has voted this message useful



indiana83
Groupie
United States
ipracticecanto.wordp
Joined 5489 days ago

92 posts - 121 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Cantonese, Italian

 
 Message 2 of 19
02 January 2010 at 8:19am | IP Logged 
This is the approach I use.
http://french.about.com/od/writing/ss/typeaccents_2.htm

Edited by indiana83 on 02 January 2010 at 8:20am

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sonsenfrancais
Groupie
United Kingdom
sonsenfrancais.
Joined 5978 days ago

75 posts - 85 votes 
Speaks: FrenchC2

 
 Message 3 of 19
02 January 2010 at 11:12am | IP Logged 
I do a lot of typing in French so I have found it worthwhile to learn to type on an English keyboard as if it were a French keyboard ! It takes a little time to learn, but it's worth it

Here's the link to one of my sites that explains how

http://www.listentofrench.org/Accents.html


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novemberain
Triglot
Groupie
Russian Federation
Joined 5843 days ago

59 posts - 87 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC1, Italian
Studies: Spanish, Portuguese

 
 Message 4 of 19
02 January 2010 at 8:39pm | IP Logged 
On Mac OS X, one can type accents and other diacritics
with
out having to switch away from English layout
. After a while, it becomes second
nature.
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BartoG
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
confession
Joined 5446 days ago

292 posts - 818 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek

 
 Message 5 of 19
03 January 2010 at 8:35am | IP Logged 
If you're using Windows, do the following:

1) Start
2) Settings
3) Control Panel
4) Regional and Language
5) Keyboard and Languages tab
6) Change Keyboard
7) Add Keyboard
8) Add US-International
9) Click on the Language Bar tab and choose where you want your icon for changing keyboards.

From then on, all you need to do is make sure you're using the International Keyboard.

To do acute accents, type ' then the letter: 'e = é
To do grave accents, type ` then the letter: `a = à
To do the circumflex, type ^ then the letter: ^a = â
To do the diaresis, type " then the letter: "e = ë
To do the cedilla, type ' then the letter c: 'c = ç

Note that if you need to use a symbol independently, you need to hit a space after it before letters that combine to form accented characters. Eg, to type "A you need to type "[space]A. Without the space, you'll get Ä.

You can also install the French keyboard if you want to learn it by using exactly the procedure outlined above depending on whether you mix French and English (I switched to the US-International keyboard in grad school for writing English language history papers that cited a lot of French sources) or are only going to be writing extended chunks of French.
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jeff_lindqvist
Diglot
Moderator
SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6908 days ago

4250 posts - 5711 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English
Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 6 of 19
03 January 2010 at 4:56pm | IP Logged 
I wonder what letters/symbols a English keyboard has instead of the accent keys of a Swedish keyboard... Five accents are covered on just two keys. One has ´and `, another has ¨,^ plus ~ as the Alt Gr option.

With those, I can type several accented vowels, which are in use in many international words. A lot easier than installing another keyboard. The only letter I can't type that easy is the cedilla, so for that one I have memorized the ALT codes (Ç: ALT+0199, ç: ALT+0231).
1 person has voted this message useful



Sprachjunge
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 7164 days ago

368 posts - 548 votes 
Speaks: English*, GermanC2
Studies: Spanish, Russian

 
 Message 7 of 19
03 January 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged 
jeff_lindqvist wrote:
I wonder what letters/symbols a English keyboard has instead of the accent keys of a Swedish keyboard... Five accents are covered on just two keys. One has ´and `, another has ¨,^ plus ~ as the Alt Gr option.

With those, I can type several accented vowels, which are in use in many international words. A lot easier than installing another keyboard. The only letter I can't type that easy is the cedilla, so for that one I have memorized the ALT codes (Ç: ALT+0199, ç: ALT+0231).


Ugh, I know! :) The answer is, there aren't any accents, because English doesn't use accents, and it somehow never occurred to programmers that anyone would ever need to type in any other language, ever. Instead there are separate keys for brackets, one key for slashes, one for quotation marks, one for semicolon/colon, one for a question mark/backslash, and separate keys for the comma and period.

Sometimes I think, really English? You couldn't have retained one umlaut, a few consistent uses of an accent over letters that would require a keyboard more compatible with the majority of foreign languages that English speakers tend to learn? As it is, the only word I can think of offhand that uses a diaeresis is naïve, and that's if you want to be pretentious.

To the original post: A website called www.typeit.org is the most elegant solution I've found for the writing that I do. It offers the following languages in the most intuitive approach I've seen yet: just press ctrl and the letter closest to the one that you want (e.g. a for ä in German), and you're in business. It superimposes the Russian keyboard over your own, so no problems there.

# Czech
# Danish
# Dutch
# Esperanto
# Finnish
# French
# German
# Hungarian
# IPA (English)
# Italian
# Polish
# Portuguese
# Romanian
# Russian
# Spanish
# Swedish
# Symbols
# Turkish
# Welsh

Edited by Sprachjunge on 03 January 2010 at 5:23pm

2 persons have voted this message useful





jeff_lindqvist
Diglot
Moderator
SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6908 days ago

4250 posts - 5711 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English
Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 8 of 19
03 January 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged 
Sprachjunge wrote:
The answer is, there aren't any accents, because English doesn't use accents(...)


I know I've seen (or written) animé, café, née, resumé, Brontë, Chloë, Zoë, and the tilde sign for approximation or range. The acute accent is fairly common in Swedish, but not the other diacritics. However, our keyboard still has them. Perhaps there are more keys on a Swedish keyboard than an English?


1 person has voted this message useful



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