Typing Russian characters with virtual keyboards

If you want to learn Russian online, you need to type Russian (cyrillic) characters.

All modern operating systems offer the ability to add so-called "virtual" keyboard layouts to the default one: if your computer has a US QWERTY keyboard, adding additional virtual keyboards allow you to get a French AZERTY keyboard with French accents and special letters like ç, or a Russian keyboard with all its Cyrillic characters.

On my Mac, a setting in the Language & Text preferences menu allows me to define various input sources. I added Russian, which gives me a real Russian keyboard layout :

Here is also a spreadsheet view. On my Windows 7 machine, the lower and upper case "ё" is located to the left of number 1, instead of the bracket sign which I couldn't find, even by playing with the Ctrl or Alt keys. Overall, I like the Mac layout, even if I find the dot and comma are oddly placed at the top. 

More Mac-gic: I also found an option called Russian - Phonetics, which follows an AZERTY model with a few differences and may spare you some time learning the specific Russian layout above.

Windows users don't have this option by default, there seems to be a few softwares that do this (Google search results). Frankly, you might be better off learning the Russian layout.