Все10, a typing tutor for Russian (cyrillic) characters

There are tons of resources to learn Russian, but as soon as you get serious about it, you need to learn how to type with a Russian keyboard.
For the last two weeks, I have been copy/pasting Russian words into Google Translate and occasionally completing words with the Russian-Phonetics virtual keyboard, but increasingly I have realized it was time-consuming to figure out the "phonetic equivalent" and keyboard location for characters like ч, я or щ.
So, yesterday I decided to go on a search for free typing tutor, клавиатурный тренажер, from the word клавиатура, keyboard. It wasn't long before I found Все10 (www.vse10.ru) on Google.

Bce10 is an online typing tutor with a great design and completely бесплатно, free. The only little downside is that it's entirely in Russian, but that should not stop you: the big yellow button попробуй прямо сейчас (try it now) on the homepage allows you to get a feel for what's ahead. Try it for fun (remember to switch to a regular virtual Russian keyboard) or go straight to the registration/login page войти (login).

Registration
There, you get offered to login or register yourself, зарегистроваться. On the form you will need to provide the usual Name, Email address and enter your password (twice) with no less than 4 characters :

• Ваше имя
• Адрес эл. почты
• Пароль (не менее 4-х символов)
• Пароль еще раз

That's it ! You can start using it immediately. An email will be sent to your address but it's not "click again" to finalize your registration. 

How to use it

A large button "начать упражнение", start exercise, clearly shows the way. Switch to the Russian keyboard, and start typing the letter that appear in the top section. The keyboard on the screen shows the location of each character and the ideal position of the hands. 

After each exercise you get an evaluation of your speed, number of error and rhythm. 

знак : character

вы набрали : you typed

со скоростью : at (speed of) 

процент ошибок : percentage of errors

ритмичность : rhythmicity

As with other typing tutor, the difficulty is progressive. You can only move to the next level, следующее, if you've met the expected average (средний). If you fail, the only visible option will be go (try) again : пройти заново. 

When you register, your progress is recorded and you can start again at anytime from the last level you reached. You can view your stats from моя страница, My Page, Статистика.

I played with this for an hour and I made amazing progress, so I highly recommend you give it a try.

Happy typing !

PS : click here for the French version of this post here.

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.