Where to Type Spanish Accents Online

First, a brief moment to say WOOT!! I get to help prepare lesson materials for my previous Spanish class, so I will continue to be involved in using the language and I now have lots of excuses to create more posts on Spanish learning resources.  I have a list of topics that I am hoping to cover on my Online Spanish Resources page (see link above what you are reading) and I'm now working on Word of the Day websites and services.

But, one thing on my resource list that I feel like I should cover right now is a website that enables you to type in Spanish, with all of the accent marks and punctuation. Typing in Spanish involves several technical adjustments on your computer which depends upon which software you have and which system you have. I don't have much information that will be helpful on these issues because I have a Lenovo Thinkpad and, while I love it mostly, it doesn't have a numeric keyboard, which many foreign language writing programs depend upon. I could change my keyboard, but there's a learning curve for using it that I've been too busy to deal with.

Excuses, excuses. Anyway, the quick version of this post is:

Try using the Spanish language version of Type It. It gives you a place to enter a lot of text, and there are keyboard shortcuts for typing accents, so that once you learn them you can keep up a pretty good pace.  I tend to cut and paste often when I use it, just in case something gets lost, but the site has a feature that lets you recover things if you go off the page for some reason. Also there isn't a lot of obnoxious formatting that accompanies your text when you cut and paste (Google Translate  brings along all kinds of unwanted stuff, at least on my system).

I see that they now have an inexpensive version you can buy and set up on your own PC. Once I get more room, I will do that, because this program makes me very happy.  Not only can you type Spanish, but quite a few other languages (with characters similar to English, no Arabic or Hindi or anything), symbols, math processing characters and the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which will make the linguist in my family very happy.

So happy that I haven't done a search for other programs, but I will soon.  A lot of random text here, and in English to boot. All you need is the link above.  The rest is just a bit of happy burbling.

Oh, and here's what it looks like:

Starting my Resource Collection

Empezando mi colección de recursos. But I still don't trust my ability to write in Spanish.

Pero todavia necesito contar en Google Translate. nope, GT says:

Pero todavía tengo que contar con Google Translate.

See what I mean? Maybe my unaided version was readable, but the GT version certainly makes sense and seems to be correct now that I've seen it. Awkward is one thing, misleading is another. Sigh.....

All that to say this, which will, one day, be translated into Spanish, I swear!

There are several different "word a day" resources out there, but I really like the sentence examples of Spanish Dictionary's Word of the Day, 

http://www.spanishdict.com/wordoftheday

The sentences are simple, use few unusual words, and are in present, preterit, imperfect tenses, maybe more.  I'm gradually pasting them into a Flashcard Machine study list, 

http://www.flashcardmachine.com/machine/?read_only=3360440&p=7tg7. 

The goal is not really to memorize all of the words, but what it is doing is letting me read a lot of simple sentences, over and over.  I would like to do my own practice by changing tenses of these sentences, maybe putting them into dependent clauses, something where I can repeat the same thing over and over, with variations. I'm hoping things will become more instinctive this way. So much of language study seems to involve sample sentences that you struggle to make sense of and then never see again.

OK, so right now this is becoming a blog in English about studying Spanish. So be it, at least for now.  I actually love reading language study blogs, so maybe this wouldn't be so bad long term, but it's not my goal to only speak ABOUT Spanish.  I am wondering if greater reading/sentence creating ability will eventually translate into greater speaking ability. Again, we shall see. 

I'm wondering if becoming interactive with vocabulary lists, in the way I'm considering above, or some other way, is going to be helpful in language learning. I'm wondering, over all, just what IS most effective in language learning. And I imagine that, whether or not the method is the most effective, hypothetically, anything that gets us into daily contact with the new language is more helpful than not.  Well, yeah, obviously.....