El Aula – Todavia, Aun or Aún? – Which to use?

Why is Todavia written into the title incorrectly keyboard scalewithout an accent? / Todavía

Firstly, let us apologise for having the word, todavía, in the title without a tilde or accent. We are well aware that our students must be wondering why we are doing that, especially when we are supposed to be teachers.

Well, it’s all about the search engines. If we want the search engines to pick up the word todavia, (and we do!) we must write it without an accent. Why? Because when people are Googling a word they rarely if ever write it with its correct accent.

So, todavia without an accent get searched for 22,000 times a month whilst todavía with its corresponding accent gets written into Google only 1,900 times a month.

It’s only normal that people who are not used to writing with accents or don’t know how to configure their keyboard would write ” todavia” instead of “todavía”. But, we think that it is important to get used to writing with accents and so, we have decided to offer a little tutorial on how to change your keyboard to Spanish.

Firstly, however, we wanted to tell you what is happening in our new project LightSpeed English.

A distinct lack of accents.

When we are writing our blogs and titles for LightSpeed Engish etc. we use the same analysis to see who is searching for what in the Spanish speaking world. The real shock has been that no matter how bad non-spanish speakers are at NOT putting accents on the words, the Spanish speaking world is 100 times worse!

We have crazy results when we try to write something like: “Conversación en inglés.” Google tells us that a few hundred people have searched for that. ‘Strange’ we think. ‘Surely there must be more Spanish speakers interested in hearing English conversations.’

So, then we put into the analysis: “Conversacion in ingles”  (not an accent in sight!) and 100,000 results appear!

This has happened time and again. It seems that the majority of Spanish speakers simply do not use accents in Google. Is it because they can’t be bothered, they aren’t sure about them or it’s faster? We don’t know, but whatever the reason, it’s wrong!

So, in future blogs, if you see a word that should have an accent and doesn’t, you’ll understand why. However, we will always mention it and have the correct version visible.

Come one, guys! Let’s work to get the accents back on the words. It’s what makes Spanish beautiful and it helps pronunciation no end!

How to add accents.

Go to start button (if you have)

Go to Control Panel

Under Clock Region and Language Choose ‘Add a Language’ Win 8

Choose Clock, Region and Language Win 7 or below

Choose Add a Language Win 8

Choose Region and Language Win 7

Choose Add a language Win 8

Choose on the tabs of the box that appears Keyboards and Languages

Scroll down to Spanish and click the box with Spanish Win 8

Click change Keyboards Win 7

Click the Spanish you want. It’s country specific. A good one is Spanish traditional sort. This will give you an icon on your bottom bar. You just click it to change the language of your keyboard. Win 8

Click add on the box. A long list will appear. Scroll down to Spanish and choose the country you want. A good one is Spain traditional sort. Click the plus sign next to the one you want. Click the plus sign next to keyboard.  Click the box Spanish. That’s it. You will have an icon on the bottom bar of your pc and you click it to change between your own language and Spanish.

On an English keyboard, the tildes can be found where the @ sign is. You hit that key first and then the vowel you want. This puts it on top of the vowel. To discover the rest, you need to play around with each key. Open a word document and start to hit each key to see what it does. Then hit each key with the shift button on and you will find the other important keys, too.

Good luck, and happy accenting! Oh, and enjoy the videoblog, too.

Video for This Spanish Lesson

Audio for This Spanish Lesson