Bilingual keyboards?

Ok this question probably doesn't concern half of the people, but feel free to shift your opinion anyways

So basically my question regards bilingual keyboards(duh! ).

I'm just wondering what makes them so bad?

I'll speak for the English/French one since that's the one I'm concerned with.

Last I saw one, it's basically just an English Keyboard with a few extra french symbols put in blue over certain keys right? I mean, I guess you can find that annoying, but the English keys are still pre-dominant cisually so I doubt I'd actually get mixed up typing with a bilingual keyboard.

Does it have something to do with the settings of said keyboard? I mean, my old laptop, despite having an English keyboard, still had the option to swap languages of the keyboard and I'd often find myself typing a wrong thing because I clicked the language switch button by mistake lol (ex: I'd get 'é' instead of '?'). It can't really be much different for a bilingual keyboard no?

So yeah, what makes them that bad?

 

I love em... I use Japanese/English keyboards and I REFUSE to ever use any other keyboard again...

 

some don't like the shortened left shift key, my AAO came with a bilingual kb and one of the biggest complaints about the CAN version of this netbook was the bilingual kb.

 

How is the shift key shortened? Are there more keys on a bilingual keyboard or something? When I checked, it just looked like a normal keyboard but with extra writing on it

 

Sometimes there's more characters than fits on the standard English layout, forcing a key (often Shift) to be shrunk. Wikipedia's diagram indicates this to be the case for the Canadian Multilingual Standard, as well as Canadian French - and a lot of others as well. Implementation may vary, of course - I'm sure there are some Canadian French/Multilingual that don't shorten the shift key, given the prominence of standard-size-Shift keyboards in Canada.

My guess would be on some bilingual keyboards you'd still have to switch languages, either on the OS or with a key (X2P?). But you probably could type everything with the Canadian Multilingual in both English and French. The Canadian French/Multilingual looks to be quite similar to the U.S. English keyboard in layout.

 

Ah ok, yeah that could be true. In the french/case though, there shouldn't be that many issues. We use the same alphabet, just that french has more accents so some buttons are changed to accommodate these accents(instead of typing ATL+number in an english setup).

The layout from what I've seen is more or less the same.

As for the configuration, my previous laptop(even though it had an English keyboard), came with the option to swap languages on Windows so I'm guessing a bilingual keyboard is the same >.>