Member-only story
Study tips
I found a Great Tool for Language Students
Lexicool makes it easy to type accented characters
I’m currently studying a part-time degree in French and German through the Open University. While training your brain to learn not one, but two, new languages at once is hard enough, trying to type accented characters on my laptop has made it so much harder.
I don’t know if this is a Windows thing or just a my laptop thing, but I cannot easily use special characters the way you can on Mac. None of the shortcuts I have tried work and the symbols menu on Word is clunky as hell, it takes ages to find what you want and just generally adds a needless layer of time and complexity to the task.
Thus far, I’ve been searching online for a word I know has the character I need in it and copying and pasting, which would probably give my tutor an aneurism if they knew.
Enter Lexibar, the easy-to-use toolbar add-on from translation resource Lexicool. This post is not sponsored, by the way. I am just a tired and frustrated student whose life is tragic enough that this discovery has just about made my year.
On the Lexicool website, you can download a toolbar for a wide range of languages, featuring all the characters you can’t easily type on a typical English…
