I grew up in the US, and learned on standard US qwerty. After I moved to Europe, I found myself needing to type French, German, and Romanian words enough that I

I grew up in the US, and learned on standard US qwerty. After I moved to Europe, I found myself needing to type French, German, and Romanian words enough that I set up XCompose and I've been very happy with it. You just pick one key to be your compose key (AltGr is the classic choice, but menu, right windows, and caps lock are also good choices), and then you can hit Compose, accent, letter in sequence to type one of the "special" characters. As a bonus, you can actually configure your own sequences for letters that you need often. For example, I have Compose ,s,h bound to ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯, Compose,g,<any letter> bound to produce Greek characters, and Compose,t,q bound to my username. XCompose is available on Linux using `setxkbmap -option compose:ralt`, on Windows using WinCompose, and there's probably a way to do it on OSX but I refuse to support that particular company on moral grounds so you're on your own.