Many people asked me how to study Quenya/Sindarin or how to begin writing

with Tengwar, so I thought I'd write a quick FAQ guide to answers all of your
questions.
Enjoy!
Lucia Deetz
1. Where to learn elvish (Quenya or Sindarin)?
There's so many tutorials on the internet it's hard to point at only one of
them. I personally found the lanuage lessons on councilofelrond.com to be
pretty good and easy to follow. There's also the course called "quetin i lambe
eldaiva", which you can find here: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/
after scrolling down the page. This last PDF course is much more detailed
than the course on CoE, so I'd suggest you - if you start learning elvish from
the very start - to get the hang of the language through the CoE course first.
2. Where to learn how to write with Tengwar?
Tengwar is an aplhabet just like the latin and russian alphabets, so firstly you
need to know how each letter of the source alphabet is to be transliterated to
the new alphabet. This is a good guide for this purpose:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tengwar.htm
3. What are "modes"?
Quenya and Sindarin are both elvish languages, but they're not alike. They
are written in a completely different way when using Tengwar. This because
many Quenya words end in a vowel, while many Sindarin words end in a
consonant. Every language has its own transliterating mode and you have to
make sure you're using the right mode when transliterating from source
alphabet to the new one. FE, you can't use the italian tengwar mode for
writing english words and the other way round. The tutorial linked above also
talks about modes.
4. What if I want to write Tengwar with the keyboard?
There are lots of free Tengwar fonts available on internet. Just pick one of
them and install it on your computer. When writing with a text editor, you
musn't forget that the keys layout is not the same as in the "qwerty" layout.
Latin letter A and the tengwa for A are not positioned on the same key. Use
this
image
as
a
layout
guide:
http://quenya101.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/tengwar-keyboard-layout.png
5. What if I'm lazy and don't want to search for every single key?
I'm lazy, so I've got the answer. There's a little but very useful program called
TengScribe that does all the dirty work. You install it, you download the modes
you need, you run it, you write in latin letters, the program automatically
transliterates them in Tengwar for you. In less than 3MB. The link:

http://at.mansbjorkman.net/tengscribe.htm
6. How come every time I copy a string of text from TengScribe and
paste it to another text editor I get a random series of weird
symbols?
Go to question number 4. Select the string of text and switch the font of your
text editor (fe, word, notepad and the like) to the Tengwar font you installed
on your pc. The transliterated text will appear.
7. How do I use Tengwar on my blog/site/else?
I'm afraid you can't, at least if you're thinking of text strings. The only thing
you can do is taking a screenshot of your desktop and copy/paste it on Paint,
cutting out the unwanted parts and leaving just the picture of the text.
8. How to get a good elvish pronunciation?
Just
keep
listening
to
Tolkien's
own
recordings
(here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6de_SbVUVfA) and try to emulate the
sounds. Pronunciation may be easier or harder depending on your native
language. It may be a bit harder for an English mothertongue than for a
person speaking any latin language, but it's not impossible. Tolkien himself
spoke English and managed to have a perfect elvish pronunciation.