Russian and Technology

Support for Cyrillic has been with computers for a long time. If you use emacs, you can M-x set-input-method to start typing in Russian with zero config!

One advantage of using Russian over other European languages is that you can use your same US keyboard with all features intact (other Euro keyboards typically shrink the left shift button to make room for another key).

I haven't found an easy way type accents in Russian. You can copy-paste the accented vowels from here.

Learning to type

Once you have the basic keyboard layout memorized, you can do short speed tests at 10fastfingers for fun.