I like to play around with studying languages. Up until recently, I’ve been studying languages that use the Latin alphabet so the default keyboard plus a couple of keystrokes have been sufficient.
I’m now expanding to other languages/writing systems. I know there’s way to have a keyboard for other language options, but I’m not sure how to set it up on my Windows 10 computer. I have been doing this so far on the ancient tablet I inherited from my dad but it is becoming less and less useful, so I’d like to set this up on my PC. I do NOT, however, want to change the default language. I just want to swap to a different language while studying, then flip back to English.
I think it would be ideal to be able to call up the “touch keyboard” from the task bar with different language options but I’m not sure how to do that.
I am at a bit of a loss on how to do that. I have looked up the options for Windows 10, but I’m still a little hesitant. It’s so much information that I find it overwhelming and there seem to be a lot of assumptions that don’t really fit with what I’d like to do. I don’t want to change my default language, just have the option to type in a non-Latin writing system when I choose to do so. I don’t want to get into a situation where I can’t use my computer because suddenly everything is in Greek, literally. As an example.
Any suggestions/advice? I’m probably overthinking this.
If you don’t want to mess around with installing the language packs, you can always just go to Branah and use their online keyboards.
To install a keyboard for other languages, go to settings and select add a language. You should get a list of available language packs. Install the ones you’re interested in using at the moment.
I’ve been studying Japanese for a while and I basically did what @Monty described. In the case of Japanese, for example, when using that keyboard I type out the Hepburn romanization of the word and Windows will automatically convert it to the correct kana and then (if applicable) the correct kanji. So nihongo (Japanese) becomes にほんご which becomes 日本語.
Yes, it’s annoying that sometimes my keyboard misbehaves. I don’t know how it got the French Canadian keyboard, I assume it was a default install - but hitting some wrong keyboard combination, I would find the extended characters like “/” not working properly. The code in the lower left would instead of “ENG US” be CAFR". Click on that to change input, or as the prompt says when hovering over that, “Press Windows Key and Space to change input”.
One place I worked, the workstations in the plants, settings were locked down to a large degree - but some clever and annoying types had discovered that they could still alter the keyboard setting, so every so often we’d have to go change the keyboard back from German or French or some such.
When I was driving trucks, we often spent long boring hours in the cab waiting to be loaded or unloaded. When getting into a cab at the start of a shift, it was no surprise to find the onboard computer switched to Spanish or German. The problem was, of course, that the prompts to change it back were in that language.
I’m a Norwegian living in the US and keyboards are annoyingly slightly different. It’s extremely clunky typing the three Norwegian vowels Æ Ø and Å when using an English keyboard, so on my personal laptop I have both installed and simply switch using win+space whenever I really need the English keyboard.
My work laptop is all English though, and with a lot of punctuation being on different keys my touch typing suffers a little for some symbols. ( for instance is on the 8 on a Norwegian keyboard so since I’m bad at typing touch at all outside of the letters I will look at the keyboard, deliberately press the key next to the ( and be annoyed when I don’t get a (. Which of course is not really relevant, but exemplifies me having a lot of experience switching back and forth.
Most of these can be set independently, but keyboard layouts are defined within a language. For instance, if the language is U.S. English, you can have layouts for U.S. English and Greek available within it. This site shows how to add a keyboard layout to your current language, or to remove one.
Once the alternate keyboard layout is installed, you can switch back and forth by clicking on the indicator in the system tray (lower right of the screen) or pressing a set of keys to toggle between layouts (by default this is Windows key + space ). It’s also possible to define custom key combinations that take you directly to the desired layout.
It’s often useful to turn on the on-screen keyboard, which always reflects the active keyboard layout and shows you which key does what. This is available in Windows Settings under “Ease of access”.
Languages such as Japanese and Mandarin involve “input methods”. This is supported but I have no experience with those.
The one you seem to be worried about is the Windows display language (the language the menus and options are written in); this one is actually pretty hard to trigger by mistake as it involves downloading and installing a language pack in Windows. You shouldn’t need to do that for languages like Greek, as far as I know.