Are 40% keyboards practical for non-English users?

[vatin]

Especially in languages with many more letters than English alphabet.

[suicidal_orange]

It could be said they are not practical even for English users - having to find punctuation on layers is too much of a problem for most people.

Looks like you have a Planck and I imagine Thai to have lots of letters (based on absolutely nothing) so you're probably in a better position to answer than most people.  Perhaps a custom layout with the least used letters on a layer would work better than trying to use a standard layout?  The best time to do this would be while retraining your fingers to use column stagger so it may be too late.

[vatin]

We have 44 letters in Thai and I need to use the lower/raise keys quite a bit too often that it gave me a sore thumb.
Would like to get opinion from others in similar situation.

[Nerif]

As a Russian who use 60% (tilda in russian layout on stands for weird E letter with two dots on them) I would like to say that using a 40% will be a huge pain for you. But still, if you REALLY want to try this out, then why not? The entire hobby is about preference, so you might get used to them and actually feel really comfortable with this form-factor.

[jamster]

It could be said they are not practical even for English users - having to find punctuation on layers is too much of a problem for most people.

I'm with this. I tried an Atreus for a while and rapidly realised that having to chord all the time made the keyboard unusable to me. Not a knock on Atreus, I think the company and product is great, just not for me at all.

[granola bar enthusiast]

its tough with turkish where the punctuation and other keys are replaced by other letters and are always traditionally accessed with layers, having a base of 3 layers just to use normal keys is annoying