German alphabets - Language Bar to my rescue

After myself enrolling for a course in German language, I had pretty tough time to digest those grueling tongue twisting  pronunciations. Any how I decided to take on this new challenge head on, to get myself acquired with a new linguistic skill. So each day I had to learn a handful German vocabulary to keep up with the lessons. 

To keep pace with learning a bunch of  new vocabularies, I turned to Google Translator and other online sites for instant German to English translations which got me results in a jiffy than those bulky dictionaries. The very moment I started using online tools, I hit a road block while dealing with special German characters on standard English keyboard layout.

In German language you could find four new special characters\alphabets other than the standard 26 English alphabets. Here the first three characters are called Diacritics (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) and the last one is called the ligature (ß).  In simple terms the Diacritics and the ligature are alphabets specific to German language and here's how its spelt.

ß - Pronounced as "ss" or called "Sharp s" or Scharfes.

ü - Pronounced as "uyuh".

ö - Pronounced as "ooh".

ä - Pronounced as "ay".

After doing some research on this, I came up with an apt and elegant solution for this very problem which was the Language bar. So in order to key in those special German characters what all I had to do was pretty simple, just select "German" from the options and proceed typing in those Diacritics and ligature, thats it. So lets start off with on how to setup the Language bar for German language in you computer.

1. First of all I assume, you are using WindowsXP or higher for this feature to work.
2. Open "Control Panel" and click open "Region and Language Options".
3. In the "Region and Language Options" window, select "Languages" tab and click "Details" button.
4. Now you will see a window with the title "Text Services and Input Languages" like the one below.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Next click on "Add" button. 
6. The "Add Input Language" window will come up. Here select "German (Germany)" from the "Input Language" drop down and click  "OK".
   
   
   
7. Now you should be seeing the "Text Services and Input Languages" window with German Keyboard listed, like the one shown here.
   
   
   
8. Now click "Language Bar" button in the "Preferences" section. This should take you to the "Language Bar Settings" window as shown here.
   
   
   
9. Here in "Language Bar Settings" window, check\tick the "Show the Language bar on the Desktop" and click OK.
   
   
10. Click "OK" to close all the open windows.
11. Now you are almost there with just one more step to go. Enabling language bar in your windows Taskbar.
12. To enable Language bar in you Taskbar right click the TaskBar and select "Language Bar" from the "Toolbars" menu. 
    
    
    
13. You should now see an icon left to the System tray in you taskbar. If you click the icon, it will show the available languages. For us, we now have English and German. Here you could see the tick mark is against "English (United States)" that means, you keyboard layout at present is set to "English US layout", to change that to German layout just click "German (Germany)" and there you are. Now you have a keyboard layout to key in those special German diacritics and ligature.
    
    
    

Now lets complete the last mile of the journey. How do I key in those special characters with my standard English keyboard? I don't know how you keyboard layout is like; but Microsoft Windows does know. Lets ask windows on, which are those keys designated for special German characters on my keyboard?. So here we go. 

1. Before we move on, make sure you had selected "German (Germany)" from the Language bar icon in the task bar.
2. Select Start-> Run.
3. keyin "osk" (without quotes).
4. press enter key.
5. You should get something like this on your monitor.
   
6. Now looking at the key layout shown in the "On Screen Keyboard" window, you should be able to map which all keys act as special German characters. 
   
   
7. Here in my case you could see the following key's map\correspond to the German diacritics and ligature.
   
   
   ß - Key next to "Zero" or the second key to the left of backspace.
   ü - Key next to "P".
   ö - Key next to "L".
   ä - Key next to "ö" or the first key to the left of "Enter".
   
   
   Now when ever you want to switch between the English or German keyboard layout, here is simple tip. Just press "Alt" + "Shift" to cycle between the Keyboard languages listed in the "Language bar". You will see the icon on the Taskbar changing from "EN" to "DE" and back.
   
   
   So thats it, Auf Wiedersehen (Good bye).