You CAN Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

...At least when it comes to typing.

I complained in an earlier blog about how the Spanish language keyboards were impossible to use and how I couldn't stand them. Well, I am now eating my words.

In my office, my computer obviously has a Spanish keyboard, so that's what I type on the majority of my day. But, I have noticed during the past few days, that when I try to type on my own laptop at home at night, I type all the wrong keys. My hands have re-learned typing...in Spanish.

And so here's a fun run-down of some of the Computer 101 that I have had to re-teach myself. Enjoy!

• The @ symbol for email addresses (oh so crucial when I need to log in to Facebook, duh) is not on the number 2.  Instead, it hangs out with the letter Q. When you want to use the @, you hold down a new key -- the alt gr -- that's to the right of the space bar and then hit Q. It took a while to get the hang of that one.
• The quotation marks are with the 2, the / is with the 7, and the parentheses are on the 8 and 9.
• Both the question mark AND the apostrophe have moved to the right of the zero. That one was especially tricky to remember.
• To create accent marks, you hit the button to the right of the P (nothing happens) and then hit the letter you want to type. It magically creates an accented letter!
• Something I think is genius: the button to the left of 1 has the symbol for degrees (°). So handy!
• And of course, there are extra keys, like the ñ the ¡ and the ¿
• Oh, and the Shift keys are tiny. That's one thing I don't like very much.

I've also had to re-learn some of the keyboard shortcuts. Now...

• Control + B is Find (Find = Buscar)
• Control + G is Save (Save = Guardar)
• Control + N is Bold (Bold = Negrita)
• Control + K is Italic (Italic = Cursiva = sounds like K?)
• Control + S is Underline (Underlined = Subrayado)
• Control + E is Select All (not exactly sure why)

Fun, huh? Guess I'll have to re-learn U.S. keyboards in a year. :)