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How to type French on an English keyboard | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| aricarrot Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5512 days ago 20 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 19 03 January 2010 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been learning French for awhile and I've been using the US International keyboard-- it becomes second nature soon enough! Just make sure you type a space after a quotation mark or apostrophe if you want that to show.
I have a question for anyone else using the US international keyboard: is it possible to type the French/European "<< >>" quotation marks? Or the oe smooshed together letter (don't know the name...XD) ? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5241 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 10 of 19 03 January 2010 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French quotation marks:
Right-hand alt + [ = « Right-hand alt + ] = » Make sure you're using the alt-key to the right of the space bar. Can't help with the "oe" - I'm not sure anyone types with it anyway. The alt-code is 0156. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachjunge Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6959 days ago 368 posts - 548 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 11 of 19 03 January 2010 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
You're right, of course, and I made my point sloppily. You will note that these are all loan words (Chloë and Zoë are alternate spellings of names that are usually Chloe and Zoe in English, and Brontë was completely made up by the Brontë sisters' father, who was originally named "Brunty" and probably wanted to hide his humble origins by embellishing his family name with a diaeresis). But these are clearly exceptions, and the fact is that many English speakers choose to write them without (except, ironically enough, Brontë). And the tilde sign often serves as a prefix, as in ~50--not as a mark over a letter. It's actually on my keyboard, but I can only use it by itself, not as a Spanish tilde, for instance. I think we have one key fewer than you do. Where you have the äåö, we have brackets and quotation marks. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ZeroTX Groupie United States Joined 5929 days ago 91 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 19 04 January 2010 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I use this method for Spanish characters, too. Just like the Mac keyboard, this is simple and becomes second nature (and doesn't require a $1500 laptop) :) I often just leave my keyboard on this setting, although in Windows (XP, Vista, 7), you can easily swap back and forth using the taskbar icon that is automatically created when you add a second layout.
-Z
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| ChrisVincent Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Mauritius quicklearn.t35.com Joined 5229 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: German | Message 13 of 19 07 January 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Wannabeafreak,
you have to know the corresponding ASCII codes if you want to type french special characters from an international/english keyboard. e.g. for 'é' , you press ALT and type '130' on the numpad. here are the codes: é - 130 â - 131 à - 133 ç - 135 ê - 134 ë - 136 è - 139 î - 140 For you to be able to use them correctly, you can either memorise them or write them on a piece of paper and keep it near your computer. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kf4ebp Newbie United States Joined 5399 days ago 13 posts - 18 votes Studies: English*, German | Message 14 of 19 11 January 2010 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Change your keymap to US International.
For the short term you can get a description and picture of its usage from Wikipedia. For a longer term fix, you can do what I did. I added stickers to my keyboard. Including shipping it cost about $6 US. I use the US international keymap exclusively and the only time that I notice it is when I forget that the apostrophe is now a "dead key" and requires an extra keystroke (the spacebar). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5317 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 15 of 19 11 January 2010 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, there are. As a matter of fact, I bought a Swedish keyboard to have the extra keys in particular (though I think that all European keyboards have them...) The most noticable one is the shift key is shorter and there's an extra key on that row... as well, at least on my particular model, there's an extra key on the middle row... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5229 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 16 of 19 11 January 2010 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The following will be of no use to the majority of people here, but I'll post it anyway. When I came across this method a few years ago, it was a revelation to me, since at this point my touch-typing skills had deteriorated dramatically due to frequent changes of keyboard layouts. Now I can get all special characters without ever changing the layout or typing numeric codes. It works the same way on all operating systems.
If you know vim, you're in. If not, you could get it at vim.org, but I must issue a warning. Vim is the Formula One car amongst the text editors, and without intense training you won't make it around the first corner. You'll probably find it unusable, as I did at the first encounter about 13 years ago, and regret having spent any time downloading and installing it. You've been warned. There are two ways to enter special characters in vim. The first is always available, and the second needs to be switched on, because it could interfere with normal typing. For the first method you type Ctrl-K and then two characters in arbitrary order that make up the so-called digraph. One is the base character like a, e, or c, and the other is the accent: ' for accent aigu ! for accent grave > for accent circonflex , to turn c into ç : for German umlauts a to turn a into the Swedish å So to write déjà you type d<Ctrl-K>e'j<Ctrl-K>a! As mentioned above, e' will do the same as 'e, and a! the same as !a. This still is a bit awkward if there are lots of special characters in your text, so here is the second way: if you enable the digraph mode (:set digraph) you can write one of the two necessary characters, delete it with backspace immediately, and then type the other. Since <Backspace> is easier to type than <Ctrl-K>, this saves you some time. Switch off digraph mode with :set nodigraph. Have a look into the candy store at :help digraphs and :help digraph-table. :wq Edited by OlafP on 11 January 2010 at 9:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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