French keyboard

I have 2 questions:
(1) I haven't figure out how to make a capital letter with accent such as À, lower case à is fine after Jason pointed it out the little square box needed to be checked. I'm slow when it comes to technology stuff when it is obvious to most people. 

(2) How does the Points Goal, the green circle # relate to the board points "awarded". For example I had 2163 points inside the green circle but on the Leader Board I had 1119. Just curious...

For the À question, no, unfortunately there's no way to do it on the French keyboard (nor the Ç, É or any other accented capitalized letter). The good news is, the accent on the capitalized letter is optional in written French, and almost no one does it anymore. I just do it to reinforce the idea that's it's supposed to be there. :)

By the way, on a mac, you can still do it by using the shift key while holding down the letter to select the different accents.

Are you saying in any written essays, formal or otherwise you can just run one sentence to the next without any capital letters?  At the rate I'm going I will never be able to write anything meaningful but I will keep an hopeful mind. The emails and texting I received from my next generation relatives have no capitals or punctuation marks. So French, the language is like our youth.  

I'm old school; I want to write properly when I need to or should. So from now on I don't have to sweat it. 

I received a Mac after I signed up to RF so I use the laptop as a dedicated RF computer, less distraction. I do use my iPhone to practice writing when I am waiting for an appt and if I'm not fast enough the state of CA in the United States became ÇA. 

Oops, not exactly. I meant that you can omit the accent. For example, you can write:

«Salut M-L ? Ca va bien ?» instead of «Salut M-L ? Ça va bien ?»

Haha, yeah, there's nothing more annoying than getting emails that read "hi m-l! u ok?"

 

M-L, are you wanting to use the accented Á, the  Ç, and other French accent marks in writing such as the RF Forum, or are you wanting to use them with Microsoft Word?  As Torusan said, there's no easy way to used them in this Forum; however, in Word it's quite easy.  Simply type the letter in lower case; Word recognizes the letter as being at the beginning of the sentence and automatically capitalizes it.  The accent remains in place.

I'm not as versed in French as is Torusan, but I've also read that capitalized letters don't generally have the accents they would have elsewhere.

I'm using them in the RF writing tests; I'm a beginner. I always tried to use upper case as in English for the beginning of a sentence but I couldn't figure it out how to do the upper case so I thought to ask from the seasoned students/speakers. For example: I typed à gauche but the answer was automatically changed to À gauche so I thought I must be wrong not to have used the upper case but my minimal understanding of the inner workings of computers failed to help me. 

Based on the info from you and torusan I can continue to do the RF writing tests in lower case with accent from the keyboard. Being a beginner I am trying to do the proper way instead of forming bad habits or doing it incorrectly of the new language I'm trying to learn. 

I'm taking a break hopefully not for long; I lost my voice due to laryngitis. I don't want to see the 50% that I usually get from Paul down to 0%. :-( Not good for my ego, Haha

Thank you both!

 

Hi there, 

On the Writing Test, unfortunately there's no way to capitalize "Ç", but it is possible to capitalize vowels with accents, you need to click on the bottom left box, then on AltGr, select the symbol you need, click on Caps and then select the letter you need.

Cheers!
 

I am assuming we are talking apple to apple because I noticed spanish was your last screen name. I followed your suggestions step by step until I click on AltGr then the alphabets are gone. What I could use from that keyboard or what was left of it was l'accent grave, circonflexe and tréma. There were no l'accent aigu or cédille. That's seemed like a lot of work for me for 3 accents. 

Lets say the answer was à la banque I just use the lower case from the "write it" keyboard; it saved me time. But if I were in a precise mood then I used a site called Type French Accents which has everything I needed in lower case just like a regular key board; shift and picked the letter I wanted or even type the whole thing, Êtes-vous....; copy and paste. 

I have changed/relaxed a lot in a week after torusan explained to me about the upper and lower case so now if the first letter had an accent it will be in lower case with accent. Diana-S1 had good suggestions too except I'm not good enough to write anything on Microsoft Word yet. I use my iPhone to write while waiting for my appts or when I'm on the go; it's very intuitive. 

Thanks, marie-rocket-spanish! Being a beginner in French, I need all the help/suggestions I can get.