Wouldn't it be great if everyone spoke the same language, ate the same food, watched the same sports, and had the same alphabet?  Well I certainly don't think so.  I remember when I was in school, my French teacher would tell me that leaving the accents out of words meant that they were misspelled.  That certainly gave me a good reason to remember to put them in.  Unfortunately, my pc keyboard does not have these accents, and therefor it is hard to keep spelling foreign words correctly. Fortunately there is a good solution.  It's called the US international Keyboard layout.

The US international keyboard layout is my favorite keyboard because it allows you to use the buttons on your keyboard that you are already familiar with, and be able to easily place all kinds of accents on top of characters.  Here is how to set it up.

In Windows 7, click on:

1. Start
2. Control Panel
3. Clock, Language and Region
4. Change keyboards or other input methods
5. Under the Keyboards and Languages tab, click on Change Keyboards
6. Click on Add, and then select English (United States)- United States International
7. Click on OK.
8. In the menu, select any other keyboard that you have and remove it by clicking on Remove.

There you go, you have just enabled the US international keyboard.  Now to test it out.

1. Click on start
2. Type in Notepad and hit the enter key

Type in the following exactly as you see:

To type the French accent aigu

study - 'etudier

'a'e'i'o'u

To make the accent grave

Very good - Tr`es bien

`a`e`i`o`u

To make the accent circonflexe just precede the vowel by the caret symbol ^.  It's the one above the 6, so you will have to press shift and "6" simultaneousely.

hotel = h^otel

The c cedille is made by preceding the c with the character '

French - fran'cais

The important ß es-tset is essential in German. Just press the right Alt key and "S" simultaneously:

football - fu<RT ALT+S>ball

For German umlauts, just precede the vowel by a double quote ".

Austria - "Osterreich

There are two ways to get the Spanish ñ:

Spanish - Espa~nol

Spanish - Espa<RT ALT+N>ol

To type the upside-down question mark just type the rightmost ALT key and "?" simultaneously:

What's up?  - <RT ALT+?> Que pasa ?

Oh my! - <RT ALT+1> Aye caramba !

To Type the Euro(€) Symbol press the RIGHT-ALT key and "5" simultaneousely.

The train to Paris costs <RT ALT+5> 30 one way.

The British Pound symbol(£) takes some practice... It's three simultaneous keystrokes... RIGHT ALT, LEFT SHIFT and 4

A ride on the London underground costs a whopping <RT ALT+SHIFT+4> 4.  That's quite expensive!

And finally, to ignore the special character, just press the spacebar.

The teacher said "<SPACEBAR> Edward never forgets to use accents! "<SPACEBAR>

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any trouble getting some special keys.