[^1]: Completely off topic, but I love when there are words that capture a feeling in one language for which there isn't a suitable analogue in another. For non-Thai speakers, this word means burdensome, but depending on context covers the whole span of "inconvenient" to "distressing". In general, though, I find English has more individual words that express an entire concept vs. Thai which has to use compound words to explain its meaning.
In Polish we have 9 such characters and most people use just so called "programmers keyboard layout" which uses left-alt + letter to do the accent.
E.g. alt + e = ę, alt + l = ł (with a one case where we have two different accents for a single letter: z, so we use alt+z = ż and alt+x = ź, the second letter is less commonly used then the first one)
20-30 years ago there were some strange keyboard layouts that didn't use alt, but hopefully they were forgotten.
Some people move to BÉPO or something like that, I use QWERTY with Xcompose.
on the right of the keyboard: ù
but that's enough to want accents and symbols on the number row by default (&é"'(-è_çà) and numbers when pressing shift.
I think that's the reason that bépo (a French variant of dvorak which allows easy access of both common accentuated keys and numbers) is more popular among French speakers than dvorak is for English speakers, proportionally.
It's also terrible if you're French.
I've learned from Thai speakers that there are multiple words that mean multiple things depending on the context. Where as English (and Dutch) do have this sometimes, but less often than Thai words. I am pretty sure (but correct me if I'm wrong) that both Chinese, Japanese and Korean have this too.
Dutch also has some interesting words that cannot be directly translated to English. In Dutch we don't have 'siblings', we have 'broers en zussen' where 'broers' are your brothers and 'sisters' are your sisters. There is no word that we use for both of them. Same with the word 'gezin', it means the family you are living with.
Another one is 'giftig' which has 2 english words too. Poisonous and venomous, but in Dutch it is the same thing.
I have never seen anyone use an Alt+number to get these, I personally default to EN layout and switch only when I write in local language.
We've retained x y q (no purpose in our alphabet), making it quite convenient to just type using the native keyboard layout, regardless if I'm writing in my native language or in English.
All typing machines used it, but it was awful for programming obviously, so the "Polish programmer's layout" was added, and because it was exactly the same as standard american QWERTY (except for Left Alt + some letters) it won almost overnight.
Windows still shipped with both layouts enabled for Polish locale for decades, and nobody used the typis one, but there was a shortcut that changed between them.
When you accidentally used that shortcut - if you had Y or Z or Polish letters in your password - you couldn't log in (because you typed "yeti" but got "zeti" but it still looked like * * * * :) )
I think there must have been millions of USD lost on support calls because of that little shortcut :)
Even then, plenty french programmers use a qwerty layout of some sort. I saw people using the Canadian layout, and the international layout is I think the most efficient for IT stuff, even if it requires getting used to composing accentuated characters.
If you're looking for something more phonetic possible as a stepping stone, Lao, despite having less content to consume, is much, much easier to learn where the abugidas look about the same if you squint; you could look at Lao as simplified Thai (with a 6th tone). Lao had a spelling reform recently that dropped all the duplicate letters for Pali/Sanskrit words, there's no implied vowel (and they change form less), there's no การันต์ (◌์), and the final consonants are normalized to the sound it makes. Lao and Thai are asymmetrically intelligible where Lao people understand Thai but not the other way around. That said, the Northeastern Thai dialect, อีสาน, is almost identical with small dialectal differences. Grammatically they are the same so anything you learn in one will almost certainly transfer to the other with just a different vocabulary set for common words (to do, to work, I, you, man, woman, etc.).
Good luck and สู้ๆ นะ!
à â ç é è ê î ï ô ö ù
If I remember correctly shortcuts to change layout/language are by default Ctrl+Shift and Alt+Shift respectively (correct me if I'm wrong). These are incredibly annoying, especially in some games. Luckily though you can disable them from the settings. Instead there's Win+Space, which is a Godsend and should've always been the only default.
Fun fact: on Windows Polish programmer's keyboard you can use the Tilde key (Shift+Grave) to input Polish characters as well, e.g. press Shift+Grave (it won't put in any symbol at this point), release and then press 's' to input 'ś'. However it makes it problematic to input the tilde symbol itself, so I've modified my layout with the MS Keyboard Layout Creator to get rid of that functionality/flaw (aside from other minor improvements) https://www.microsoft.com/download/details.aspx?id=22339
The shortcut to change was definitely something with Ctrl and Shift because I remember accidently switching layout when I was selecting text by whole words with Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right.
Tilde works funny on linux - it makes alternative version of every letter, not only from the current locale. I was accused of being a Russian pretending to be Polish on some Polish forum long ago because I wrote something with a Greek (or cyrylic?) letter by accident because I did something with home directory in the background and only pressed ~ once instead of twice :)