Using the US-International Keyboard
To use the Java-based grammar exercises, you will need to install a keyboard layout that allows you to enter accented and other characters used by French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian such as á, ì, ö, ç, and ¿. The best way is to install the US-International keyboard driver found on the original Windows installation diskettes or CD. Here are the instructions for installing the driver:
For computers using Windows 7:
1. Click on Start, then Control Panel.
2. Under “Clock, Language, and Region,” select “Change keyboards or other input methods.”
3. Choose the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, then click on the “Change keyboards” button.
4. If the “United States-International” does not appear in the lower box under “English,” click “Add.”
5. Scroll down to highlight “United States-International,” then click OK.
6. Highlight the new keyboard configuration and select it as your default keyboard if you wish.
7. Click OK to return to the Control Panel.
For computers using Windows XP:
Once the driver has been installed, accessing the accented characters is quite easy because the characters for acute, grave, and circumflex accents and tildes have now been made into "dead" keys, which means that nothing happens immediately upon pressing the apostrophe key or another accent key. If the next key pressed is a vowel, an accented vowel will appear. For an accented a (á), for example, just type the apostrophe, then the a. For an è, type the backward apostrophe ` then the e: è. An i with a circumflex is created by typing the circumflex (shift 6: ^) then the i: î. This also works with the double quote (") for the umlaut (dieresis) and the tilde (ñ, ã). Not all combinations are so intuitive:
Note that if the next key entered after the accent is not a vowel or other letter, then you will get the apostrophe or other mark followed by the letter: 'n, ^p, ~d. If you want to enter just an apostrophe or other mark, enter the mark followed by the space key to get ' " ^ ~, etc.
Hold down the
Alt key and enter the
Finally, for word processing, Word has language features built into it that allow for easy creation of Spanish language documents. The accents remain the same (using the US-International keyboard), but you can set up Word to detect the language automatically, invert the ! and ? before a word, automatically superscript the ª and º, and perform spell check and the thesaurus functions in Spanish.