First, the positive:
I'm very glad this Krystal exists. The Standard Lakota Orthography (SLO), which this keyboard uses, is the most intuitive and easy to understand spelling system I've ever seen for Lakota. With all the other ways of spelling/writing Lakota that I've been taught, you can only guess how to pronounce a new word you see...just like English. SLO makes it so much easier: I love that I can figure out a new word just based on its spelling. Some people are put off by the "wablúška" (wedges above letters) and say that makes it look like Czech language, but there's always a learning curve with anything new. Once you get comfortable reading it, it is really a great system.
As for the keyboard itself:
It's great to have a Lakota & Dakota phone keyboard, but this one has so many problems that my friends and I, who would like to use it to practice our language with proper spelling, have given up on it.
Some of the issues:
-The default is set to all caps. This is annoying because it requires extra toggling to get to the most commonly used set of letters (lower case) every time.
-The vowels with stress marks are likewise on a different screen that requires extra toggling. The Google keyboard handles this much better: you hold down the key for a vowel, and the version with a stress mark appears as an option above it. (ie "a" > "á")
-The keys don't have distinct boxes around them like on other keyboards, so you just have to touch the screen in the general area of the letter, and hope you're close enough that the right letter, not the one next to it, will appear.
-There is no exclamation point (!). I don't know why. There also isn't an ampersand (&). This is minor, but definitely impedes communication; having to toggle over to my English keyboard for a common punctuation mark is tedious.
My complaints about all this toggling may seem frivolous, but when you're trying to have a text message conversation, speed is important, and these extra obstacles slow you down considerably.
The Dakota computer keyboard, also put out by LLC, is wonderful and makes it easy to communicate in the language on the computer. But this one has led many of us to either give up on texting in the language on our phones. Some of us resort to approximating the spelling the best we can with other phone keyboards that lack letters like ŋ, ǧ, & ȟ, which is not great for learned who are trying to master basic spelling.
I wish this keyboard was more user friendly, or that there was another one out there that had all the letters we need for the language, because I'd do a lot more phone communication in the language if I could.
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secretadmirer369
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