How To Add Other Language Keyboards And Toggle Between Languages On Your Computer

My child is studying in a Chinese school but I don't know Chinese, so when the time came for doing school reports in Chinese using the computer, I did not know how to type in Chinese on my computer. How do you type Chinese characters on a pc. How do you get your computer to show the Mandarin characters? 

What about on Facebook. How do you tag the friends who have their names in another language? How do you type a foreign language using your computer's keyboard? I took hours to figure it out. Even after adding a new keyboard language, it took me another couple of hours more to figure out how to use it! I am going to save  you those hours now by showing you a step by step tutorial on how to add other language keyboards and how to toggle between languages on your computer.

Step 1. Let's get started. Click "Start".

Step 2. Click "Control Panel"

Step 3. Double Click on "Regional And Language Options"

Step 4. Click on "Keyboards and Languages"

Step 5. Click on "Change keyboards"

Step 6. Under "Installed Services", scroll and search for the language you want, then do step 7

Step 7. Click "Add"

Step 8. Click "Ok" and when you are brought to another window, click "Ok" again.

That's it. You're done. You have now added another foreign language input for your computer. 

The next part of this tutorial is to show you how to toggle between your English keyboard and your foreign language keyboard.

To switch between keyboards, you can do either one of these two methods.

Method 1. Press "Alternate (Alt) and Shift" key at the same time.

Method 2. Look for the language indicator on your computer's task bar. It is at the bottom right of your computer. Click on the language to toggle between languages. For example clicking on "EN" on my pc brings up the following choice of keyboards for me.

 Select the language you want to type in.

You can now type in the foreign language. I am using Mandarin which allows me to type in pinyin as shown below.

Tip when typing in Chinese pinyin. After you key in the pinyin, press the corresponding number to select the characters you want. In the example above. After typing "nihao", click on the number "1" to select the given choice in Chinese characters.

I am using Chrome and Windows Vista for this tutorial. However, if you are using other systems, the method should not be very different from these. Just different names, that is all.

Thank you for reading. 谢谢