I have a US laptop (no surprises there).
But now, in Germany, I must at times type things in German. Here are the things I've learned so far.
First, I had to install the US International keyboard on my Windows system. I boot to my default US keyboard, but when I need international characters the key combination Shift+Ctrl toggles to and from the other keyboard. On the international keyboard there is a difference between the left and right Alt keys. The right one is sometimes called Strong Alt, or Alt Gr.
Important characters in German:
Germany still uses the character for some double-s instances which looks like a Greek lower-case beta - ß. I produce this character with AltGr+s.
Germany also sometimes uses two dots over the a, o, and u characters. There are two ways to produce these in US Intl mode.
1) press double quote " followed by the vowel. ä ö ü. This causes trouble when you want to start a quote with an A, O, or U word. In these cases, type a space once after the double quote, to produce a double quote. "As I show here."
2) the second method uses AltGr key combinations.
For ä hold AltGr+q
For ö hold AltGr+p
For ü hold AltGr+y
Currency here is the Euro. AltGr+5 gives € the Euro symbol.
The issue I don't have a good solution for yet is quotation marks. In Germany the most commonly used quotation style begins with a double quote at the base line curving towards the quote, and ends with a high double quote also curving towards the quote. For example: He said „You must learn German.‟
I have not yet found a key combination the produces these characters. I think that if I had a full keyboard with numeric keypad I could type the Unicode (Unicode 201E and 201F) but I'm using a laptop keyboard. For now I usually ignore the issue and use US style quotation marks. But, for extreme circumstances I've stored the correct quotes (double low 9 quotation marks and double high reversed 9 quotation marks) in a reference document, from which I can copy and paste.
In some MS Office applications I can automate this with autocorrect, but I'm not always in Office.
