Adding a keyboard layout

The step nobody mentions

This site will teach you to type Russian, Tamil or Greek. None of it produces a single Russian, Tamil or Greek character until your computer is willing to send those characters to whatever you are typing into, and that is a setting rather than a skill.

It is worth separating three things that get confused, because each fails in a way that looks like one of the others. A font decides how a character is drawn; a missing one shows you boxes where letters should be. A physical keyboard is the plastic under your fingers, and it is very rarely the problem. A layout is the mapping in between — the software that decides, when you press the key labelled Q, which character arrives.

Only the third one has to change. The same keyboard you already own can produce every character in every language on this site, because the letters printed on the keys are a convention rather than a wiring diagram.

Wrong glyph, or boxes

A font problem. The layout is working and nothing can draw what it sent.

Wrong letters entirely

A layout problem, and usually the right one: you have the layout you asked for and have not learned it yet.

Nothing at all

An input method waiting for you to finish a syllable or choose from a list. See below.

Where the setting lives on each system

The path has moved between releases on every one of these systems, which is why it is worth knowing the two words to search for rather than a sequence of clicks. Open your settings, search for "language" or "input", and the result you want is the one offering to add rather than to translate.

Which layout am I on?

The commonest version of this problem is not a layout set up badly. It is a layout switched on by accident — the shortcut is two keys on every operating system, and it sits next to shortcuts people use all day — after which the keyboard is doing exactly what it was told, in a script nobody asked for.

You do not have to open a settings panel to find out which one. Press A, S and D and read what arrives. Those three keys are enough to name most of the layouts on this site outright, and to narrow the rest to two or three that differ a little further along the row.

If what you get is not in the table, the same three keys are drawn on every language's lessons page here, and the writing system will usually be recognisable from the shape of what appeared.

Choosing between two layouts for one language

Several languages offer more than one standard layout, and the choice matters more than it looks: they are different skills, and switching later means starting the map again. The language pages here say which one is taught and why.

Where a country runs typing examinations, the layout those are set in is usually the one to learn, because it is the one employers and institutions mean. Otherwise the choice is often between a national standard and a phonetic layout that maps letters onto their nearest Latin sound. The phonetic one is easier to start, for the obvious reason that you already know where the Latin letters are. What it gives up is the arrangement: a national standard is laid out around that language's own letter frequencies and hand alternation, and a phonetic map inherits the frequencies of English instead. How much that costs a fluent typist is not something anyone has measured in a way worth quoting.

If you are only going to type the language occasionally, the phonetic layout is a defensible choice and nobody should talk you out of it. If you expect to write in it regularly, learn the standard.

The keycaps will be wrong, and it stops mattering

After you switch layouts, the letters printed on your keyboard are fiction. This feels like a serious problem for about a week.

The reason it stops being one is that touch typing does not read the keycaps. Once the map is in your fingers you are not looking down, so what is printed there is decoration — which is why experienced typists in several scripts happily work on a keyboard labelled for none of them.

Stickers and a second keyboard both work, and both have the same drawback: they make looking down productive, and looking down is the habit the whole method exists to break. If you are learning the layout properly, the honest advice is to use the keyboard guide on screen and leave the keys alone. If you need to be productive in the language this week and cannot wait for fluency, buy the stickers and do not feel bad about it.

On-screen guide

Keeps your eyes up and disappears on its own as recall builds. What this site is built around.

Stickers

Cheap, immediate, and they encourage the habit you are trying to lose. Reasonable as a stopgap.

A second keyboard

Best if you switch languages constantly and worst for learning, for the same reason.

When a layout is not enough

For most languages, adding the layout is the whole job: one key, one character. Chinese, Japanese and Korean work differently, and what you are adding there is called an input method rather than a layout.

Chinese and Japanese are typed by sounding a word out — Pinyin or Romaji, on the Latin keys you already know — and then choosing the written form from a list of candidates. The keystrokes are ordinary; the skill is reading the list quickly and accurately. Korean is not like this despite also needing an input method: the jamo sit directly on the keys and the software assembles them into syllable blocks as you type, with nothing to choose.

Several complex scripts add a smaller version of the same idea. In an abugida, marks attach to the consonant they modify, and the order you press the keys in is not always the order the marks appear in on screen. That is the software composing rather than a mistake, and it is worth knowing before you conclude your layout is broken.