How to write French accents with a QWERTY keyboard

You might be confronted with this problem if you bought your PC in the States and are using it to write some French. Well, I found an easy technique to type French accents and I’d like to share it with you!

Go under Start > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options
When the new window pops up, select the 3^rd tab: “Keyboards and Languages”
Click on “Change keyboards…”
You should now see listed your keyboard languages.
Add the following language: “United States-International”.

I advise you to remove your previous language as it can be a pain to switch from one keyboard to another, and it sometimes does do this while typing. Very irritating…. Or you can leave it as it is and come back later. Just make sure “United States-International” is now on top of the keyboard list (using the “move up” button).

Open now a blank email or Word document to try it out.

If you wish to write a word with “é”, type your accent first “ ’ ” followed by “e”

Here are a summary for most common accents and tricky French letters:

‘ + e = é
` + e = è
^ + e = ê
^ + u = û
‘ + c = ç
` + a = à
“ + o = ö
“ + i = ï 

One thing you will notice now that you have switched to the United States-International keyboard is some of your actions need to be followed by the space bar to become effective. For instance this is the case with apostrophes. If you’d like to cite something, you need to type on the apostrophe symbol and then the space bar to make it appear.

This can seem a bit complicated at first, but I can assure you it all becomes automatic and efficient after a short while.

I wish you inspiration to write great French texts now that you know how to type them!

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