When acquiring a new language, it almost always comes with some special characters which are not available on an English keyboard. Sometimes new languages even come with new alphabets (e.g. Russian, Arabic, ...) or even have a symbol-based writing system (e.g. Japanese, Chinese, ...). Today, I'd like to focus on how to access special characters that come with languages that use the Latin-based alphabets.

As far as I can figure out there are two main methods for writing special characters that aren't on your computer's keyboard:

1. use alt code
2. add a second keyboard layout via software to your computer and toggle between them

There also is a third way, but I would rather describe this as a horrible hack because it's rather time consuming: Copying and pasting each character.

Below, I will explain these two methods in detail.

1. Use Alt Code

I will start this explanation with a story from my childhood. When I was growing up, computers were already available, but mostly for offline work because connecting to the internet was still expensive. So I started exploring our computer offline, scribbling in Paint, playing Solitaire, PinBall and all the other good games, using Wordart in Word and simply trying out different key combinations on the keyboard.

One day, I was randomly pressing keys and suddenly a heart (♥) appeared on the screen. I was totally surprised and tried to do it again. As I didn't have a clue what I was doing, I ended up getting other symbols until I realized that the magic key here was the "ALT"-key in combination with the numbers on the num pad. Little Linda still didn't understand the concept behind this, but she was happy with her discovery.

I actually didn't consciously use the alt code again until I worked in the US for two months and had to correspond in English and German. Without my beloved German keyboard, I wondered how I was supposed to type the German special characters ä, ö, ü and ß without having to replace them with ae, oe, ue and ss. Then I remembered that I had read somewhere about how to produce all kinds of characters using the alt code, so I went to my preferred online search engine and looked them up.

After looking them up, I wrote them on a sticky note and attached them to my monitor. The cool thing is that alt codes can be used on any Windows computer that has a keyboard with a number block attached, no matter which language the computer is set to. Also, the procedure is quite simple: Press and hold the Alt key and then type in the number of your desired character et voilà – it appears on your screen. The drawbacks of this method are that it doesn't work if you're using a laptop that doesn't have a number pad. It also requires quite some time because you have to press several keys instead of just one.

2. Add a Second Keyboard Layout to Your Computer and Toggle Between Them

If you're somewhere else, for example the library, and sit in front of a computer, you expect it to work just like your computer at home and it normally does unless you're not in your own country. When I was doing my Erasmus in Valencia, I sat in front of a computer at the university and I did exactly this. And it did work until I typed some words that included "y"s and "z"s. As I just typed on the keyboard as if it were a German one, I typed several words that looked like this:

I reallz like yoos. The animals there are just lovelz.

Upon closer inspection of the keyboard, I realized that the only difference was that y and z were swapped and for sure the absence of my beloved German characters ö, ä, ü and ß. In the place of ö, there was ñ and ä was replaced by the acute accent. And instead of ü, I would type the grave accent on the Spanish keyboard. Since I was learning Spanish and trying to write in Spanish on my own computer and had figured out that there were so few differences between the German and the Spanish keyboard and since my laptop didn't have a keyboard with a number pad, I decided to change my computer's keyboard (software-wise) to Spanish. After doing that, I was quite happily writing in Spanish until I wanted to write in German again. So I asked my preferred search engine how to change back the keyboard language. The answer was quite simple: Windows key + space key. So I pressed WIN + space and was back to my German keyboard. This was indicated in the right bottom corner right next to the clock where it said "DEU". For English, it says "ENG", Spanish "ESP" and European Portuguese "POR".

With this in mind, I had an idea: the only character I needed from the Spanish keyboard was the "ñ", so I could simply press the following keys in order to get that character: WIN + space, "ö", WIN + space. Now I could continue writing on my German keyboard without having to worry that I would confuse y and z again and again.

So here is how you add another language to your computer:

1. go to settings
2. look for language settings
3. go to preferred languages
4. click on "add language"
5. select your target language
6. install the language (this might take some minutes)
7. press WIN + space to change your keyboard language
8. open the on-screen keyboard to see which keys are different now (alternatively, you can also print the keyboard of your target language and put it next to your keyboard)
9. repeat if you have more than one language that you like to add (but be careful: If you do so you have to press WIN + space several times to switch between languages)

I hope these methods are useful to you. If so, please let me know in the comments. Do you have any other methods on how to use special characters on your computer? Please share them in the comments as well.

Edit 04.12.2020:

Thanks to Wikipedia, I found that it's possible to design your very own keyboard layout. I did that using Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). How to use that program is described in the following link: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-custom-keyboard-layout-windows/