I finally finished learning the handwritten cursive version of the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian today – I’ve been learning it a few letters at a time, so it has taken a while. Now I can write down the Russian words and phrases I’m learning more easily – writing the printed versions of the letters seems decidedly awkward to me. I might even investigate Russian calligraphy.
Now I just need to map my fingers to the Russian keyboard layout so that I can type Russian as well, instead of picking the letters one at a time from , as I’ve been doing. I just found an that helps you learn various keyboard layouts for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian. There’s a similar site with even more keyboard layouts .
After many years of trial and error, I can touch type English fairly well, and type the other Western European languages I know as well. I can also type Chinese using pinyin, and Japanese using romaji. When typing Czech though (not something I do very often), I get accented letters like ě, č, ů and ž from BabelMap.
When learning a new language, especially a new alphabet, do you usually learn how to type it?