Guide
The first question people ask when they need traditional Mongolian script (ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ) for work or study is how to convert what they have already typed in Cyrillic. The honest answer is more complicated than it looks — here is why, and what to do instead.
Cyrillic Mongolian dates from the middle of the twentieth century. Traditional script is far older and spells words by rules of its own. One Cyrillic letter does not always map to one Mongolian letter: word-final vowels, case endings and words that sound alike but are written differently all depend on meaning and origin rather than on sound alone. Automatic conversion is a starting point, not a finished answer.
Correcting a converter's output is usually slower than learning to type the script itself. The Writer draws the Mongol bichig keyboard on screen, so nothing has to be installed on your computer, and every key shows its Cyrillic equivalent in small type — you do not have to hunt for letters.
There is no keyboard layout to add, no font to download and no account to create. Open the page and type. It works on a phone too: you tap the keys drawn on screen.
You can save what you write in the Writer and come back to it, or copy it into Word, Facebook or an email. What you copy is Unicode Mongolian, so it renders correctly anywhere the font is available.
Typing usually feels slow because the layout is not yet second nature. The key-position practice fixes exactly that, in lessons of a few minutes each.
Fully automatic, error-free conversion is an unsolved problem: the spelling depends on a word's meaning and origin, not only on how it sounds. If the text has to be right, typing it in the script directly is the shorter path.
No. The page loads the font it needs, so the script renders correctly with nothing installed.
Yes. What you copy is Unicode Mongolian, so it displays correctly anywhere a Mongolian font is available.
Yes. A phone's own keyboard has none of these letters, so you type by tapping the keys drawn on screen.
There is a separate guide covering which letter sits on which key and what Shift does. It is a few minutes of reading and it links straight into the practice.
Nothing to install and no account to create. Open it and start typing.
