Typing
Ok, so how many of you can type? I can type purty good, fairly fast with not too awful many mistakes.
But that’s not so difficult.
How many of you can type in a foreign character set?
I’m going to guess none. I’m also going to include myself in that total, but go ahead and reckon that I’m further along. Let me tell you, it’s right damn hard. Never mind the issues of trying to remember the word for soandso or how you were thinking you might make an actual understandable phrase. Let’s throw a different character set and layout into the mix too! Yaay! Fun!
No. With the booing, and the hissing!
It adds two issues. First, Cyrillic has letters that look like Latin (you know…these kind you are reading now) but are totally different. P is really an “R”, and the “P” is the Pi symbol, and the backwards R is neither of those — it’s “ya.” Yes, like Minnesotans agreeing, you got it. H is really an “N”, and there is no actual “H” sound. That’s what’s said but I don’t entirely agree. X is a “kh” type sound, sort of like the French hocking of the loogie sound, but not fully. However the Russian speakers themselves substitute a “g” instead, which is a character you can’t see here, but imagine a lower case r with the line straight instead of curved. So for example they have a word “gamburger.” You know some Russian, congratulations. I have no issues with writing these, but on the keyboard it’s just different enough, and years of geekly typing sorta screw around with you.
Second, the characters are laid out in an entirely different fashion, except for a single key that must actually be a joke. C is on the C key. It’s really an “S”, but half the time (I made up that percentage) in English it’s an “S” anyway. Now the rest of the lookslikeEnglish characters are moved around some. E is two over to the right on T key, Y “ooh” is on the E key, H “N” is on the Y key….it’s bad. I keep trying to end my sentences with a period but it turns out usually as a “yew”, which looks I-O ish. (Scrunch those up a bit.) The damn period is actually on the ?/ key, and a comma is a shifted period. The farking ? is a shifted 7.
IT’S MADNESS I TELL YOU!!!!!!! 
Ok, so let’s look at the damage caused by this. Now sometimes I spend extra time choosing my words carefully, and doing this in another language takes even longer…ok, let me switch gears a bit.
Dictionaries can be difficult. It’s hard to find one online with all the words you need. I did, but it doesn’t give a whole hell of a lot in the way of context. For example, looking up redneck I find something like 10-12 Russian words listed. Some of them I can easily look at, I know the word, and “redneck” would be a poor translation of that word. Some are like “oh yeah!” and some of course I have no idea about. Going back to the Russian word we decided fit, I find 16ish words in English meaning supposedly the same thing. #1 is Bushman. Now that’s a poor approximation of both redneck and dirivenshina by any stretch of the imagination. Yokel and a few other good ones were not. It was funny. Why was I trying to explain the concept of a redneck you ask? Ok you didn’t, but I just made you, so there. 
I was in my usual way exaggerating a lil’ redneckicity over the radio. I may have responded with just a yep, or maybe it was the aspirated a-yep. So my questioning friend asks what that means. And in the usual way the explanation didn’t stop with “yes.” Youknowwhoyouare says I think too much, and in explanations, that translates to the talking of too much, also. If you’ve read any of these writings so far this will be no surprise to you, and you’re wondering why the hell I’d bother explaining this. To this I can only say that you must not have been paying attention, because that’s exactly what generates the volume. Jeez. And in the usual way, I’m switching gears again. I’ll just have to scroll back and recall what I was thinking about 15 minutes ago.
Oh. It was something to do with trying to make what I say make sense, and it takes longer in a foreign language. That’d go without saying if I were someone else, I suppose.
Ok, so keeping thoughts in a head is bad enough, but when you can’t type fast enough to keep in the same ballpark it sorta…sucks. So I end up doing a lot of re-thinking, trying to figure out what I was trying to say. Then I spend a long time typing it, and hope I don’t forget again. Oh well, I’ve done it again. It’s not my fault, MWR Matt is borrowing the other phone and he keeps interrupting me to ask who’s doing all the farting. I think it’s Commo Dave, but he denies it.
I’m going to try some brevity in the next sentence. Fuggit, I’m going to ditch grammar all together in the name of expressing an idea in few words.
Two paragraph email in my other language = one hour
Wow. That was liberating. Obviously, it’s not as meaningful without the context. That’s all up above if you’ve forgotten, I’m certainly not going to explain it to you again.
Thank You, and Have A Nice Day.
