Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

I have decided to finally make a serious go at trying to learn the Finnish language properly. The eventual aim is to be able to read (sing?) the poem Kalevala in its original Finnish.

Finnish has three more letters than the English alphabet: ä and ö are used in Finnish words, while å is hardly ever used, i.e. in Swedish loan words or names, such the Åland island in the Finnish Archipelago Sea which is perhaps not the best example as it is called Ahvenanmaa by Finnish speakers.

My laptop has an English keyboard, so I need a way of typing these extra letters in. Going through the graphical menu 'Accessories' and then to 'Character Map' is a bit of a chore and slows town typing and the spontaneity of it.

So there are keybindings to type in foreign (unicode) letters. They are outlined in an Ubuntu wiki page called GtkComposeTable. That page explains two approaches. The first way is to type the unicode values.

To do this you type Ctrl+Shift+U then while keeping hold of the Ctrl+Shift, type the following code for each letter:

Typing in random codes is as unintuitive and distracting as using the character map. So there is a second approach. This I have not yet got my head around.

So there is a key called diaeresis (¨), which on the British keyboard is got by using Alt Gr and the left square bracket, so: AltGr+[

Now there is a key called 'compose', which by default is the right control key (RightCtrl). So we should be able to get an 'ä' using some combination of the following keys:

RightCtrl a AltGr+[

By bashing these keys randomly, I managed to occasionally get an ä, the same with ö also. However, I don't really get it.

Something I might explore is whether I can bind some easier and more rational key combination to ä and ö. E.g. AltGr-a and AltGr-o,

This is far as I have got so far. If anyone has any tips or has a better idea, please let me know.