Daily Dose of English 125
Keyboards
Daily Dose of English 125
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about keyboards. Keyboards. And again, there's actually two different things I want to talk about that are both called keyboards. The first one is this thing that you can hear right now, my keyboard for typing. And that's nowadays the most common thing that you'll think of when someone says keyboard. Yeah, I don't know. Every phone, every computer is gonna have to have some kind of keyboard in order to input stuff. And they're very effective at what they do. Well, sort of. I'd say vaguely interested in keyboards. I've learned some things about keyboards. I follow a bit of stuff about them. I have a mechanical keyboard. but I wouldn't say I'm like an enthusiast or anything. I don't have any strong opinions on keyboards or anything like that. And I say that because there are a lot of people that have lots of strong opinions and they really like keyboards, specifically this scene of mechanical keyboards. A mechanical keyboard refers to the kind of keys that it has. A mechanical keyboard, when you press the key, there's a mechanical switch inside, which registers the input and then it sends it to the computer and that's why they can be quite loud. Right, so that's just me pressing one key or... Right, that's a bunch of keys. And they sound quite loud because there's mechanical switches going up and down for every single key. The other kind of keyboard is a... I don't remember the name. a membrane keyboard, I think, something like that. But instead of being individual keys, it's sort of like a mat that lays down and then makes contact. You probably have this on any cheap keyboard or a laptop or almost always going to be a membrane keyboard because they're really cheap, really easy to make, and they work great. They do work fine. I have a membrane keyboard on my laptop that I think is excellent for typing. It is very comfortable, it's super nice. I definitely like that one a lot. However, there are many advantages to mechanical keyboards, such as them being very customizable, right? So if you want, or very repairable. So you can choose the kind of switches that you have. You can choose the key caps. You can choose lots of different things with a mechanical keyboard. You can more easily customize them, sorry, rather like their layouts. So you can find mechanical keyboards for lots of different crazy layouts because people can make them on their own. Membrane keyboards are harder to like make one of because the idea is that you make several thousand of them or hundreds of thousands of them. And so mechanical keyboards can be great for like smaller custom projects and stuff. And there's lots of reasons to use them. They also can light up a lot better and they're fun. And mine is definitely more comfortable for typing than the one that I had before, which is like kind of a crummy membrane keyboard, which works fine, but they just can be really nice for using in general. They're nice and heavy and that sort of thing. I actually also have a... a custom keyboard that I got because I was interested and it explores other layouts. So the layout of a keyboard is basically the order of the keys and how it's shaped. So the standard American keyboard, I think in a lot of English actually, is going to say Q-W-E-R-T-Y, U-I-O-P is the first row and that's why they're called QWERTY keyboards, QWERTY layout. But they're also laid out kind of in a weird like structure. They're not in a line, they are in row, or sorry, they're in like these weird out of order rows. And that's because they originally were made to be for typewriters, which had physical like levers that were getting hit. And it was just easier to kind of offset things a little bit to not smash into each other. but I have an ortholinear keyboard as well. Ortholinear means that everything's in a perfect row, right? So there's rows and columns, it looks a lot like a spreadsheet almost, right? There's individual squares, it's completely square, there's no extra weird sizes or anything like that. I don't actually use this day to day because it takes a lot of practice to get used to. You can look up ortholineo keyboards on the internet and see people making videos about them. They're really, really cool. I wish I could use it. It's just I need to train myself to do it. And I think I will at some point, but not yet. And so they're very, very pretty, I would say. But yes, the downside is that it takes a long time to get used to them. There's also the other kind of layout, which is what order the keys are in. So like I said, this QWERTY layout is actually roughly based on just the alphabet. So you'll see that if you look at it, it's not exactly in alphabetical order. A doesn't go to the B, then C, then D. But if you switch a couple of keys, it kind of is. And that's because they didn't really have any reason for switching most of the keys when they originally came up with the design because it was sort of good enough and made for typewriters, which weren't very fast anyways. But there are significantly better ways to layout a keyboard and to minimize wrist movement or finger movement or whatever it might be. And so there's a bunch of different keyboard layouts that just totally change the location of the keys in order to have your hands physically move less. And they are objectively more efficient for pretty much every single language that types. However, it also does take a ton of time to learn. And so if you wanna like switch to, I think they're called like Dvorak and Colmac, things like that. You can, but it takes a long time to learn and then you can't type on other people's keyboards. which causes problems, but it is cool at least. And I like the idea that if I typed more, like if I typed thousands of words per day, I would probably wanna learn something like that because my hands do get tired after typing. However, I'm fine with the QWERTY layout for now. I might learn something else in the future. But I promised a second kind of keyboard that I wanna talk about, which is like a piano keyboard. Pianos, the electric version of pianos are called keyboards. Technically, you can also call them a synth. However, that's not usually used, and that typically refers to a special kind of instrument, which is called the synthesizer, but it's weird. But we call them keyboards. So an electronic computer, an electronic piano is called a keyboard. And I grew up playing the piano and not keyboards, actually pianos. And so I don't really like keyboards that much. I don't like how they feel. They feel a little bit cheap and like fake when I play them, like they're very plasticky and the keys don't have any good movement to them. So I've never really wanted the keyboard ever, even though I wish I could play the piano here in my apartment, but the cheap keyboards just feel cheap and I'd rather not play. However, there are really nice keyboards as well that have weighted keys that do feel like you're playing on a grand piano or whatever. And so I've been thinking that at some point, if I save up a bit, I might wanna get myself a nice keyboard, but I'm just not sure. I would really like to be able to play an instrument here at my apartment, but I don't know, it's tough to choose. Because it's like an investment, not investment, it's just spending money, and do I actually wanna use it, am I gonna need it? I don't know, I think I do want to get back into playing piano and keyboard is the only real good option here since I don't want to like make a bunch of noise because I would probably play in the afternoon or the evening or whatever and so I feel like it would just be annoying and so I'd like to use a keyboard. Plus keyboards can be really fun as you can have different sound effects or things like that. That's the other kind of keyboard that I'm aware of. I actually don't have a ton else to say. I haven't played piano for quite a while but I definitely have an appreciation for the keys as you might call them. Yeah, if you go to see like a live band at like a bar or something, they might say that somebody's on keys and that somebody's their name. So with Ben on keys instead of piano because it's a more cool way to say it even if they literally are playing an actual like piano, which is a like the full-on instrument with strings and stuff. There's a stand-up piano and a grand piano, or upright piano, sorry is the name, are the different kinds of pianos that you might come across. There's more, like baby grand and all sorts of stuff, but those are the two main types you'll see. The upright pianos are the ones that have their their strings upright because there's strings inside of a piano and so their strings are are up and down so they go in the direction of gravity basically and so they're a lot smaller and so you can you can fit a a an upright piano and about the size of a desk um a grand piano is the one that has the strings laid out in big in a big box behind the piano that's what you'll see on like a concert hall or a musician's house or something like that if they really like pianos because they do sound better, they're bigger, they have more space to make sound and they're really nice but they're also huge and really expensive because there's so many different parts and pieces and stuff but yeah. Anyways, that's the time that I have for today. I hope that you enjoyed this little chat about pianos, or pianos, keyboards, and maybe learned a little something. I'm curious, let me know down in the comments, what kind of keyboard do you use at your computer, or do you have a keyboard for playing piano? I'd like to know. But that's all that I got for today. Thank you very much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed this and have been enjoying the recent episodes, but I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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