Touch typing in Arabic

It has been surprising how quickly I've been able to pick up touch typing in Arabic. It was even easier than learning to touch type in English! This is because similar Arabic letters are grouped together in the keyboard layout and almost every Arabic letter has at least one other letter that looks just like it. To further assist things, some Arabic letters are assigned to a Latin key that is similar in appearance for example و looks like a comma and so و is assigned to the comma key. Same with د it looks a bit like the ] key which it is assigned to.

خ ح ج are all conveniently located at O P [
logically غ ع are just to the left at Y U

ض ص are on the top left side at Q W
and then directly below are ش س

the ال pair which get plenty of use are located in the middle at G H and finally, either side of the pair are the ي ب and ت ن

diacritics are a piece of cake too with shift + Q adding fathah and shift + A adding kasra.

Writing the hamza (ء) that 'sits on top of a little seat' if you know what I mean is done by pressing the z key (ئ) which is yeh maksoora. When yeh maksoora is in the medial form it comes out as a hamza on a seat eg. نئل

Once I knew those locations the remaining letters were easy to pick up too. Learning to touch type occurred naturally for me when I didn't look down and guessed where the key was and then was quick with backspace if I didn't see what I wanted to. Mistakes are the deterrent and speed is the incentive.

I have also been using an Arabic keyboard tutor that I picked up the link to from another Arabic student's blog (I think). It's called "Arabic Typing Tutor V2.0" and the demo I've been using is available from http://www.pcfone.com/kbtyping.htm

It's a little buggy but useful anyway.



I'm using a Microsoft keyboard that my parents got me from Egypt so it has all the Arabic keys marked. I can't quite do everything I want to with the keyboard layout in XP, I'd still like to:

- Not sure of the name of it now but there is a diacritic for an extended aa sound like that used in first sound of هذا - it's a vertical dash above the ه
- By default the XP keyboard layouts type numerals in the Western Arabic format rather than the proper Arabic format used in the Middle East. In Microsoft Word you can select to display what it calls "Hindi" numerals and then the proper Arabic numerals will be used when typing. But obviously I want this functionality in all Windows programs. The only solution may be to modify the keyboard layout which is talked about here http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/arabicdev/Windows/tools/wPapers_layout.asp#13

Those are the only issues I can think of for now but I will keep updating this list