[Educators] [Localization] content for typing turtle

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 6:33 AM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the reply!
>
> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:54 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are you including non-Latin alphabets and other writing systems? Will
>> you include the Dvorak layout for English? At one time I could
>> touch-type in eight writing systems, so I might be able to give you
>> some assistance.
>
> The latest version of the software queries the active keymap for
> layout information, and is fully Unicode enabled.  So, if you have
> your keyboard set to Dvorak, it will teach you Dvorak.  I have tested
> it with English, Spanish and Russian layouts.

Excellent.

> I'm basically looking for someone to research the best approach to
> teaching keys - e.g. which keys, which order, how much repetition per
> key, what are reasonable speed and accuracy goals for children (for
> awarding medals), etc.

The standard method is to teach the home row first, and then teach the
reaches to the middle of the first row, to the row above, and to the
row below. At each stage it is helpful to do the technical drill and
then practice on words using the new letters. Once you have the
sequence of letters, you can look in a list of common words in the
relevant language for words that you can use at each stage. I started
compiling such a list for left-handed Dvorak, when I was learning to
type one-handed and mouse continuously with the other.

No special knowledge is needed for several steps in this process. It
should be done by native speakers, if possible.

>>> We need to develop lesson material which teaches children how to type
>>> correctly, and does so in an engaging and entertaining way.  This
>>> includes more than just teaching which finger presses which key.  For
>>> example, taking breaks and having good posture are also important.
>>>
>>> Secondly, we need to collect snippets of public domain text to be used
>>> for practice typing.  These will need to be of varying difficulty
>>> levels and lengths.  Possible sources might be Wikipedia articles, or
>>> Project Gutenberg.
>>
>> We need some preliminary exercises for each keyboard layout, first to
>> get the relative locations of the letters, and then to type single
>> words using progressively greater stretches.

I believe that there are usable corpora for each of our target
languages where we can get some idea of word frequencies.

Here is a frequency list for Spanish, taken from subtitles.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#Spanish_frequency_lists

And several for English
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#English

> Yeah, that part is actually the harder one.  It took me two hours to
> do a rough version of 'ASDFJKL;' based on researching existing typing
> programs.

There are of course many more words typable on the Dvorak home row
'aoeuidhtns' than on the QWERTY home row 'asdfghjkl'. I haven't looked
at the home rows of keyboards for other writing systems and languages
in comparison with word lists.

>>> I would like to initially develop content for at least English and
>>> Spanish, though we could start with one and then translate to the
>>> other.
>>
>> We will need the French AZERTY layout for some Francophone countries.
>> Then we will need Mongolian Cyrillic, Cambodian Khmer, Ethiopian
>> Amharic, and Arabic alphabet layouts for Arabic (Palestinian
>> territories), and Afghan Pashto and Dari. There are no doubt others
>> that will be of importance soon.
>
> Right, I basically want to focus on developing content for existing
> deployments first, in largest to smallest order.  But, whatever good
> content appears will get included :)
>
> Cheers,
> Wade
>



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