Tech Tips – Cyrillic Typing Practice


Tech Tips / Friday, August 26th, 2011

A cluster mate of mine during training remarked that he would have had an easier time learning the language if he could type it. I had to agree with him. There’s something about the repetition of typing that drives home how to spell a word for me.

I while back we learned how to have our keyboards type in Russian (March 26th, 2011 Tech Tip). If you’re anything like me, it takes a long time for me to type anything in Russian using the old two finger approach. I even bought stickers for my laptop with the Cyrillic letters (20 UAH from a local computer store) on them to make things easier to find but I still have to start from scratch each time I want to find the letters I need. It’d be great if we could type in Cyrillic just like we type in English.

This week I want to offer up a solution for those of you who want a little extra practice typing in Cyrillic. As always, I try to offer programs free of charge to help us keep up our Peace Corps budget. Unfortunately this is a Windows operating system only program and I was hard-pressed to find a Mac typing tutor. If you know of one, please send it on to me.

The program is called Rapid Typing and can be downloaded from http://www.rapidtyping.com/downloads.html. It is free to use and easy to install. Once installed, simply choose the language (English) and you’re ready to start typing. Upon first running the program on my computer I was typing in English but it was easy to switch to Russian. As long as your computer is set up to type in Russian or Ukrainian like we learned in the March 26th Tech Tip, all you need to do is press ALT+SHIFT to switch it to Russian or Ukrainian and then back to English.

The great thing I’ve noticed about this program is that you could easily use this in a class room setting to teach students typing in English. While they practice, you can practice your Russian or Ukrainian typing.

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