Mulitiple languages, automatic link to apps

[EskeRahn 5,471]

Are there any other users that uses different languages, and would like these tied to specific apps as default?

 

I use a mixture of English and Danish, and it could be nice if the language selection could be bound to the app.

As a DEFAULT I would like English, and then for specific apps Danish.

 

Though I for almost any app would prefer English, for SMS/MMS I 99% of the time use Danish, for mail it is about 50-50

 

So I would love to have the 'system remember' that whenever I use Textra (or Signal) the Keyboard software should use Danish spell-checking and logical-layout (unless manually switched temporarily of course), but for all other apps I would prefer English as default.

 

Of course the SUPER elegant would be if the Texting app selected the languge by one selected for the (first) recipient (by default using the country code), - but I have never seen anything offering that..

 

What does people in multi-lingual countries like e.g. Switzerland do. Do you manually need to switch every time, to the preferred common language?

[Doktor Oswaldo 906]

<strong class="gdbbx-bbcode-bold">Are there any other users that uses different languages, and would like these tied to specific apps as default?

 

I use a mixture of English and Danish, and it could be nice if the language selection could be bound to the app.

 

As a DEFAULT I would like English, and then for specific apps Danish.

 

Though I for almost any app would prefer English, for SMS/MMS I 99% of the time use Danish, for mail it is about 50-50

 

So I would love to have the ‘system remember’ that whenever I use Textra (or Signal) the Keyboard software should use Danish spell-checking and logical-layout (unless manually switched temporarily of course), but for all other apps I would prefer English as default.

 

Of course the SUPER elegant would be if the Texting app selected the languge by one selected for the (first) recipient (by default using the country code), – but I have never seen anything offering that..

 

What does people in multi-lingual countries like e.g. Switzerland do. Do you manually need to switch every time, to the preferred common language?

 

Hard question. Switzerland is a bad example. There is no useful Grammar and no useful Spellchecker. Our written Language is German (with some special rules). Yes we write Swiss-German with friends and so on. We just try to type like it sounds. If you write anything to a Person you don't know it gonna be written in German (At least If you have some minor Form of Education).

So the Answer to Swiss texts is: No spell-checks or settings at all (which makes using a keyboard like swipe a lot of work to get the dictionary started. I have given up, it just can't detect if I am writing German or Swiss-German and keeps showing me useless corrections).

 

There are Spellcheckers to the Swiss Version of German (de_CH, which has nothing to do with real Swiss-German, it just uses ss instead of ß and some quirks like that).

Some Apps do recognize what language you are writing and try to guess the spell-setting.

But most of the time it comes down to manually switching between de_CH and en_UK/en_US.

[netman 1,424]

I use both Dutch and English on a regular basis, but generally I keep all apps set to English because the translations tend to be lousy and confusing. However I do have gboard set up so i can swipe and get suggestions in both languages mixed, which I'm very glad it supports since what feels like not too long ago.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

Hard question. Switzerland is a bad example. There is no useful Grammar and no useful Spellchecker. Our written Language is German (with some special rules). Yes we write Swiss-German with friends and so on. We just try to type like it sounds. If you write anything to a Person you don’t know it gonna be written in German (At least If you have some minor Form of Education).

 

Thanks for the reply, Sorry, I meant (Swiss)German/French/Italian/Rhaeto-Romance. As I thought you used all four.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

I use both Dutch and English on a regular basis, but generally I keep all apps set to English because the translations tend to be lousy and confusing. However I do have gboard set up so i can swipe and get suggestions in both languages mixed, which I’m very glad it supports since what feels like not too long ago.

 

Seems like the same as in Danish. The so called Danish translations are usually so poor it is really hard to guess what is meant.

Never heard of GBoard, I'll give it a try, thanks :)

 

But I guess that you don't have national letters in Dutch, so you can stay with an English layout (we have ÆØÅ commonly used), that is why a change in spell-checker language is not quite enough here.

[netman 1,424]

netman wrote:

I use both Dutch and English on a regular basis, but generally I keep all apps set to English because the translations tend to be lousy and confusing. However I do have gboard set up so i can swipe and get suggestions in both languages mixed, which I’m very glad it supports since what feels like not too long ago.

Seems like the same as in Danish. The so called Danish translations are usually so poor it is really hard to guess what is meant.

 

Never heard of GBoard, I’ll give it a try, thanks :)

 

But I guess that you don’t have national letters in Dutch, so you can stay with an English layout (we have ÆØÅ commonly used), that is why a change in spell-checker language is not quite enough here.

 

By gboard i mean the google keyboard default on phones that don't come with some strange keyboard app by the manufacturer (link), for android 7 at least i had to update it from the appstore and fiddle with settings to get it to do bilingual. Dutch does have some characters with accents on them and such, but generally it's perfectly legible without those so I got used to doing everything qwerty and ignoring the accents are a thing. You can set the danish keyboard layout and use that for english also I believe, I had to explicitly somehow get rid of the belgian layout it wanted me to use for dutch.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

By gboard i mean the google keyboard default on phones that don’t come with some strange keyboard app by the manufacturer (link), for android 7 at least i had to update it from the appstore and fiddle with settings to get it to do bilingual. Dutch does have some characters with accents on them and such, but generally it’s perfectly legible without those so I got used to doing everything qwerty and ignoring the accents are a thing. You can set the danish keyboard layout and use that for english also I believe, I had to explicitly somehow get rid of the belgian layout it wanted me to use for dutch.

 

Thanks, Well I'm currently on an S8- with a click on keyboard. Just tried the GBoard, but (not unexpected) the software can not handle to correctly automatically swap back to Samsung when the keyboard is attached (they DO swap to Samsung, but uselessly to the SOFTWARE not to hardware keyboard...), so currently not usable for me. unless I can find some switch/setting that can do the trick (there does not seem to be a (nice) way to disable Samsungs software keyboard. As it is the same package that handles the hardware, a hard disable through ADB would not do the trick.

 

But indeed GBoard has the same idea of multiple languages in spell-checking as BB, though it does not work as smoothly as on the BB Priv. Google only seems to switch language after having had an explicitly typed word in the new language, BB is a tad smarter giver words from the other language(s) a less rank, but still have them as an option. I can normally easily type a text in Danish with e.g. an English or Swedish film title mixed in.

 

Will be interesting to see what can be done with the Pro¹.

[Doktor Oswaldo 906]

doktor.oswaldo wrote:

Hard question. Switzerland is a bad example. There is no useful Grammar and no useful Spellchecker. Our written Language is German (with some special rules). Yes we write Swiss-German with friends and so on. We just try to type like it sounds. If you write anything to a Person you don’t know it gonna be written in German (At least If you have some minor Form of Education).

Thanks for the reply, Sorry, I meant (Swiss)German/French/Italian/Rhaeto-Romance. As I thought you used all four.

 

Haha =) Not really. Most of Switzerland talks Swiss-German and writes German. Of course there are French and Italian parts. but if you don't live near these regions you won't use it. Not any more at least. We still have it in School until Highschool, but I am not that young either. Thanks to globalization and the Internet English has taken over. We go further on vacation than 50 years back. And even the French now have to start using English with Tourists.

 

Rhateo-Romance is an entirely different thing. Only 1% of the Swiss Population speaks it (yes native Swiss people not some sort of migrated culture) and they do not even have the same dialect in it (7 different forms and no guarantee that they understand each other). So it is a strange witness of a time period, where people in the mountains lived in there valleys without interference from the outside world.

 

So we will ignore that one. For all other People the combinations are usually Swiss-German/German/English, French/(maybe German)/English or Italtian/(maybe German)/English. And you are of course right, that is like your use-case except for the Swiss-German guys. Since I am one of these, I am condemned to handle it manually.

[EskeRahn 5,471]

Haha =) Not really. Most of Switzerland talks Swiss-German and writes German. Of course there are French and Italian parts. but if you don’t live near these regions you won’t use it. Not any more at least. We still have it in School until Highschool, but I am not that young either. Thanks to globalization and the Internet English has taken over. We go further on vacation than 50 years back. And even the French now have to start using English with Tourists.

 

Thanks for the clarification. Sounds a bit like Danish in Iceland. Taught in school and most likely people will almost never use it. Though some still take a university degree in Denmark, people leans towards the US now.

 

I wonder why those that produces mail/texting programs and similar never bothered to add an entry in the Address Books on the preferred language.

Especially as English has become the new Lingua Franca (excuse the pun), many will be using their native tongue plus English (or some more or less degenerated variant of it) frequently.

[smartphone.for 0]

I use both russian and english (70/30). For previous phone Motorola Photon Q I used app RuKeyboard, which allow to select language in the keyboard app, input of cyrillic symbols using physical keyboard was realized as translit, this mean if you quikly type "zh", app transforms it to "ж" and so on for other symbols. At first sight looks crazy and very uncomfortable, but in a day you can touch type the text without mistakes. Another option realized in that keyboard app is software direct replacing of input symbols in accordance with the keyboard layout "qwerty" to "йцукен", press "q" and you will get "й" etc., this also required some of touch typing skills. I think second option could be easily used for any language, because people usually use their native language and english and know both keyboard layouts, at least those who want to use qwerty-phone. Making a ton of phones with physically different keyboards is inexpedient, for "qwertz" layout it is not an issue at all, just press "y" to get "z", i do not see any problems to remember several buttons.

 

Waiting for the release of Pro¹

[EskeRahn 5,471]

...Making a ton of phones with physically different keyboards is inexpedient, for “qwertz” layout it is not an issue at all, just press “y” to get “z”, i do not see any problems to remember several buttons.

 

Thanks for the info on the Russian+English combination. :)

 

I feel much the same way on multiple keyboards, as long as the base layout is there, all the fine details is not that important. I would not like a completely blank keyboards, as the different size from a pc will not trigger the 'muscle memory', but it is not that important to me whether A-Z are printed as QWERTY , QWERTZ or even AZERTY. It would still be enough familiarities to 'anchor' the layout.

 

Not unexpectedly I would prefer a Danish print, but it clearly is a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have for me. How much do I really 'prefer' then? Well, I would not pay say £100 extra to get it, though £10 I would.