What does a German keyboard look like?

As a German learner you most likely have written a German text on your computer and find writing the extra characters ä, ö, ü and ß a bit of a hassle. You either need to use a virtual German keyboard, find the symbols on a word document and copy and paste or use number combinations for it. If you need a reminder about the number combinations, check out an older blog post about the letter ß and those other German letters.

So, while you are (maybe) struggling with those, have you ever wondered what a German keyboard looks like?

As you have probably guessed, it does have those extra letters – and this is how it look like:

So if you’re ever in Germany and need to use somebody’s German computer, remember, the Y and Z have switched and the @ has moved, but you do have keys for ä, ö, ü and ß.

QWERTY has changed to QWERTZ because the letter z is used far more than the letter y, and the @ sign had to move to make space for the ä.

Some of the task keys only have symbols, like the downward arrow for CAPS LOCK or STRG stands for Steuerung – CTRL (control), but those keys are in the same place as on English keyboards, so if you type without looking at the keys, you use the correct keys anyway.

But, as most people take their own laptops or tablets with them you probably won’t need to borrow a German PC … which possibly makes this the most useless blog post ever ☺