I’m really ignorant when it comes to computers, so how do I make my computer recognize cyrillic characters?
And also, how to tell him to type cyrillic characters (using a cyrillic keyboard)? And perhaps more importantly, how do I tell him to stop typying them and revert to latin alphabet?
Thanks in advance.
Assuming you’re using Windows XP:
Open up the Control Panel and pick Regional and Language options. Pick the “Languages” tab, and click the “Details” button at the top. A new window (“Text Services and Input Languages”) will open.
Under the heading “Installed services”, you should see an icon “EN - English (United States)” with a list of one or more keyboard layouts and three buttons to the right (Add, Remove, Properties). Pick “Add”. Another new dialog will open, called “Add Input Language.”
In the “Input language” dropdown, pick “Russian” (or whatever Cyrillic-written language you had in mind). The next dropdown (“Keyboard layout/IME”) will change to “Russian” (or your language). This should correspond with the default keyboard layout in that country. If it doesn’t you can pick through the list and find a better match. Click OK and you’ll be back at the “Text Services and Input Languages” window. You might be asked to insert the Windows CD so the Cyrillic font files, keyboard map, etc. can be installed.
You should now see two languages listed under “Installed Services”: English and Russian. Click OK again to exit.
Now, in your taskbar all the way to the right, you should see a small blue square that says “EN”. Open up the program you want to use, click on the square, and pick “Russian”. You will now be able to type using Cyrillic and the Russian keyboard layout. When you want to return to English, click the square again and select “English”. Good luck!
Oh, one other note:
If you’re using the newer, friendlier control panel that’s turned on by default in XP, here’s where you’ll find the Language Options panel:
Under Control Panel, click “Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options”. Under “Pick a Task”, select “Add Other Languages”.
Russian indeed. That’s weird, by the way. It’s been a long time since I’ve been trying to make sense with a language totally unknown to me.
Anyway…I should have mentionned it : I’m not using Windows XP but W98 instead.
But I nevertheless found the needed options. Even more amazing : it seems to work : йцукеен ! Thanks a lot for your detailled explanations. 
. This board is wonderful. . And I didn’t expect it to be so easy. . Computers are just magical :).
Now, I just have the easiest part left to figure by myself : learning the language.
Большое сласибо (the first “sentence” I write in Russian. I hope I got it right!)
Something weird I just noticed. I sent myself an e-mail to my yahoo e-mail to test this, typying random russian characters in the title, and it ended up with my spam mails, right between the vicodin and the indecent family caught fucking.
Is it the “random characters” part or the “russian characters” part that activates my spam filter? Does anybody know?
спасибо
Finally, print one whole alphabet in a font large enough to read yet small enough to fit on the empty space of a key, cut out each letter, and with a teeny dab of rubber cement, glue each cyrillic letter to the bottom right corner of the keyboard key where it goes in the traditional Cyrillic layout (which you can find using instructions given above).
Otherwise you’ll constantly be consulting a layout chart, which is difficult if you don’t touchtype, and frequently confusing certain Latin letters with Cyrillic letters that make a different sound (P is a big offender). I did this when I had frequent short composition assignments in Russian, and it was a real timesaver, plus I wasn’t chained to the language lab hours.
That was petty…
Actually, I got transparent stickers with the cyrillic letters on them, in red. Quite convenient.
By the way, after a couple hours of study, I now know why the Soviet Union collapsed. It had nothing to do with communism, with economics, with Reagan, with military expenses, with the Pope or any other hypothesis you’re all arguing about.
It’s plainly because these people don’t have a language enabling them to communicate. They don’t have distinct letters with a different sound for each of them, actually letters might not have any sound at all, when they exist said sounds are obviously of alien origin, the words change according to the weather or some other random pattern, and even a simple word as “hello” can’t be pronounced by a normal human being without exhausting all his energy for the rest of the day.
Russia will never recover.
And my plan to be fluent by tomorrow is wasted 
Oh I don’t think this is true. I’m far from fluent in Russian (2 semesters 35 years ago) but I believe that Russian pretty much has a character for each sound in the language and with few exceptions just one sound per character. English is the language that is deficient in alphabet characters and has to make one of them serve for several sounds. Long and short “i”, hard and soft “c” etc. And, by the way, “c” in English is really not needed since it is pronounced as either “s” or “k” in nearly all cases.
The Russian difficulty is with noun cases. There are six of them. There are three genders and two numbers. A Russian adjective must agree with its noun in number, gender and case. This yields a possible 36 different endings for an adjective and all the commonly used ones are irregular.
Wow - you plan to teach yourself Russian? You are either very brave, very talented, have a lot of spare time on your hands, or all of the above.
Here’s some info I got by posting a similar thread a while back:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=247627&highlight=computer
If you find any good searching tips, please let us know! There are several different Cyrillic keyboard layouts; you may want to fool around with more than one and see which is the most intuitive for you to use. Me, I’m lazy and usually just transliterate things; I admire your ambition.
Another useful trick is to use the On-Screen Keyboard. Search your drive for osk.exe
When you run that program, you’ll get a keyboard on the screen in the language you’ve selected. Just position your cursor where you want to type, and then click your mouse button on the appropriate keys.
Sometimes it’s handy to be able to actually see the keys you’re typing, especially if it’s at, say, a friend’s house who doesn’t have the stickers on the keys.
Damn it. I don’t want to hijack this thread, but it seems like an appropriate place to ask: how is “cyrillic” pronounced? And would I look like an idiot if I had pronounced it “cryllic” or “kri-lek”?
sir-ILL-ic.
And yes, you would look like quite the idiot. However, I’m sure your friends will forget about it.
Are you sure the so-called “Russian language” isn’t just a Communist plot to confuse and annoy Westerners? I’ve studied Chinese for two and a half years now, and I recently realized that this was why every damn word in Chinese has its own character, and the grammars so fucked up: they’re all speaking English at home, and they just do this to confuse us white devils.
The professor claims I’m mistaken about that, but that just proves she’s in on the plot.
When I follow these direction (XP Home) and switch to RU I get, for the alphabet - $ ! # ( , " ) + & ’ /
No place on my keyboard can I find any Cyrillic characters. I used the default Russian keyboard layout.
I’m pretty sure Russian has one sound per letter (aside from soft signs, which I think are technically diacritical marks, not letters). It’s just that some of their letters make sounds that we, in English, do not consider to be “single letter sounds.” Like “stch” “dzh” “you” etc. Do you have any language tapes? Like English, Russian is not a completely phonetic language, so you can make some funny mistakes without hearing pronunciation from tapes or a native speaker.
Honestly, sorting out the alphabet sounds is about the easiest aspect of learning Russian. Just wait till you to try to tackle “verbs of going.” bwahahahaha.
3 years in college + 7 weeks in Bulgaria
Could be that the font set for Russian isn’t installed. Can you read any of the Russian that’s been quoted in the page so far (e.g. спасибо)? If that red bolded text is legible, you have the fonts and keyboard map you need. If it appears as a bunch of gibberish (question marks, random characters, etc) you may need to install a language pack from your Windows CD or the web.
Yes, the Russian word in red, (spaseebo) is in Cyrillic characters and all other foreign words and letters appear correctly when people post them.
I’m far from an expert in this stuff and the XP instructions are crap. So what does one look for in trying to install a language pack from the CD?