I am aware of the compose key, I was just never a fan of it. I have it set up to replicate my previous autohotkey script on my laptop but I found that in some rare cases, pressing the next key for a word I am typing would change the letter from what I intended to something else.

Using the compose key like 'compose + " a' also feels unintuitive to me and introduces one more key for me to press, though I could likely get used to it with some effort.