umlaut

[mattfar...@gmail.com]

Hi. I am studying Chinese. I want to create cards with umlauts. Is there an easy way to do this other than pasting from text file - like a keyboard shortcut? Thanks very much

[Peter Bienstman]

Hi,

This is not really a Mnemosyne-specific question, and depends a bit on
the OS you use.

Typically what I do have an alternative keyboard layout ready for my
foreign language, which I then switch to if I need to input text. It
takes a little while to know where the relevant keys are, but it's
helpful in the long run.

Perhaps other people have other tips.

Cheers,

Peter

[Benjamin Barrett]

With at least Mandarin, you can do even better and include the tone marks over the vowels. 

On a Mac (recent OS), you just need to hold the vowel down and you'll get a list with diacritics. Unfortunately, that doesn't work for the umlaut/trema in combination with a tone mark, though.

For shortcuts, use the US Extended keyboard, activated as System preferences > language & text > input sources. On that tab, also make sure "keyboard & character viewer" and "show input menu in menu bar" are checked. Then you can go to the flag and select "show keyboard viewer" for assistance on getting the keys. For the trema (umlaut), use "v", as in alt + e followed by v.

On Windows, one way to get the umlaut/trema is to activate the US-International keyboard input. See http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/accents/codeint.html for Windows 7/Vista. With the international keyboard activated, type the quotation mark (shift apostrophe) followed by "u". 

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get all the tone marks with a keyboard, though. Carlinga is freeware that requires no installation (you start it up when you want to use it) that provides easy-to-use key combinations for typing all kinds of characters. See http://catology.boisset.eu/Carlinga. 

HTH

Ben Barrett

Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos