Thread: Russian keyboard layout

Howdy!
I was just reading through and could not find any thing on keyboard layouts, so I thought I would pose the question to all you learned fellows. I would like to know what everyones preferece is on this subject. Do you prefer the standard Russian keyboard layout or one of the phonetic keyboard layouts and why. Thankyou, thankyou very much! bye.

Originally Posted by DDT

Do you prefer the standard Russian keyboard layout or one of the phonetic keyboard layouts and why.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/kbd_e.htm

I only just started but I prefer the Russian keyboard layout because: -
(1) For the same price as a QWERTY keboard your can have a mixed ЙЦУКЕН (or whatever it is called) keyboard, or for 5 quid you can have decent stick on letters - for my laptop - works great.
(2) You can use a Russian keyboard.
(3) The phonetic approach is not so easy "я" is 'q'; "ж" is 'v'; "ц" is 'c' - ahx it's horrible!
(4) My guess is that there is a reason for the QWERTY and ЙЦУКЕН layouts in terms of typing effectiveness, not that I can type for toffee but does anybody know

I vaguely remember hearing that QWERTY was designed to avoid having frequently-contiguous letters errr contiguous. If you get what I mean. And I don't know how convincing that is, when you look at a word like 'the'.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Equivalent in Russian?

btw do people know how many wpm they can do? Mine is pretty poor even though I can touch type.

ЙЦУКЕН.. hmm. I can never get used to hitting shift for a comma in Russian. And where's the blasted single quote? Never did find it.

Originally Posted by waxwing

And where's the blasted single quote? Never did find it.

Yes, what's the deal with the single quote thing in Russian - do we not need it or not ?

And how many times have you typed Ж-)

waxwing.... ive been asking my wife and mother-in-law the exact same question with regards to their being a russian equivalent to quick brown fox and neither of them say they know of a scentence like it in Russian.

waxwing.... ive been asking my wife and mother-in-law the exact same question with regards to their being a russian equivalent to quick brown fox and neither of them say they know of a scentence like it in Russian.

Hey!
Just to add my own experience: I very shortly tried the native Russian layout, but at that time understanding the alphabet was difficult enough. The qwerty adaptation is quite logical, and the odd things are quickly remembered. At least, for me. (The c for ц and the h for ч somehow make a lot of sense to me...) It didn't take me more than about an hour of practice to be able to type quickly.
The only drawback is the awkwardness of using Russian keyboards in Internet cafes in Russia. I feel 4 y.o. again - at that age I started to learn the qwerty keyboard layout!
Rindert

The qwerty keyboard was designed because high speed typists in the old days would have problems when they typed too fast because the hammers on the typewriters would sometimes cross when hitting adjacent keys and the typewriter would lock up. This still can happen even with a qwerty layout but not as often because the commonly used letters are more spaced. QWERTY was also designed to slow the typist down to help reduce the hammers clashing. How do i know this? Because believe it or not i took typing at school as a subject. Got a Distinction grade as did the other 3 guys taking it... girls wernt as good in general and were slower!!!

Many years later a clever guy called Dvorak decided to rearrange the keyboard. Heres a quote from http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/history.html
"Dvorak found that the QWERTY arrangement is actually considerably worse than a random arrangement! "
So Mr D created the Dvorak keyboard layout which in theory is many times faster (when youve finally mastered it having used QWERTY all your life). I tried for a while but thought bugger it and went back to the old keyboard.

Does anyone know though, is the Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard like our QWERTY one or more like the dvorak one?

The qwerty keyboard was designed because high speed typists in the old days would have problems when they typed too fast because the hammers on the typewriters would sometimes cross when hitting adjacent keys and the typewriter would lock up. This still can happen even with a qwerty layout but not as often because the commonly used letters are more spaced. QWERTY was also designed to slow the typist down to help reduce the hammers clashing. How do i know this? Because believe it or not i took typing at school as a subject. Got a Distinction grade as did the other 3 guys taking it... girls wernt as good in general and were slower!!!

Many years later a clever guy called Dvorak decided to rearrange the keyboard. Heres a quote from http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/history.html
"Dvorak found that the QWERTY arrangement is actually considerably worse than a random arrangement! "
So Mr D created the Dvorak keyboard layout which in theory is many times faster (when youve finally mastered it having used QWERTY all your life). I tried for a while but thought bugger it and went back to the old keyboard.

Does anyone know though, is the Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard like our QWERTY one or more like the dvorak one?

I got used to type on ЙЦУКЕН keyboard and it's very useful when you type Russian only text. That layout is a standard in Russia and you don't need to type single quote because there is no such symbol in Russian. I'm using a keyboard very long time but I reach a high skill of Russian typing only about three years ago. It was an irony of fate because it's hard to buy a keyboard in Latvia without cyrillic letters on keys but I had such notebook. I wrote Russian letters by a thin marker and started to type. It had taken about three month to get used but now I'm feeling free to type in Russian.

waxwing

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Equivalent in Russian?

Съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю

В чащах юга жил-был цитрус, да, но фальшивый экземпляр

Съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю - missing ь


В чащах юга жил-был цитрус, да, но фальшивый экземпляр - ъ

I think we can forgive QWERTY's scentences missing ь and ъ. I mean, these arnt actual sounded letters but letters that modify other letters. :-)

Originally Posted by Alware

Съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю - missing ь

конечно есть мягкии знак - первое слово

Alware

В чащах юга жил-был цитрус, да, но фальшивый экземпляр - ъ

точно, тут ты прав - фраза то чуть ли не доирволюционная

там "экземпляръ" c ером

Originally Posted by waxwing

Originally Posted by Alware

Съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю - missing ь

конечно есть мягкии знак - первое слово

А вот и нет