Spell + Grammar check a foreign language properly.

Question

The method provided in Help is useless. I tested it in French; it's a joke. Someone finally gave me the right way.
Log out (know your password first, so you can log in and out). Then go to the Black apple in the left upper corner and choose System Peferences>International>whichever foreign language you need to write in and move that to the top of the list. Then create your new document in the usual manner and spell + grammar check in the usual manner. File your document away in your Document folder.
Log out of there, log back into your English language environment and you're done. It's a little heavy-handed workflow-wise, but at least it works.
If you know of and/or have been successfully using an easier method, please let me know.
So far as I know, MS Word beats Apple by a mile in this particular respect.
I mentioned it to the Apple team just in case they feel compelled to help. Let's hope they do. Soon.

Answer 1

Logging out and back in certainly isn't necessary.
Changing your primary language is required if you want to change the default language used when creating new documents from the built-in templates.
While the Help instructions are somewhat misleading, they are correct for some situations.
Remember that Pages treats language as a style property, such as underline. So the techniques
you'd use to get underlined text generally apply to changing the language:
1) Change the language with the text inspector and start typing. Any text you type at that point will be in the specified language. (If you click in a header or a text box, or even elsewhere in existing text and start typing, that will still have the default language.)
2) Select a range of already typed text, and change its language.
3) Create a new character or paragraph style with your desired language as its only property. Use that anytime you want this particular language.
4) Change the definition of all the character and paragraph styles to have your desired language, and save as a custom template. This is most useful for people that want their interface in one language but type all of their text in another.
As for grammar checking - I assume you're referring to Proofreading. Proofreading isn't grammar checking. It simply checks for certain basic errors, regardless of the language. It doesn't do sentence analysis. I think it works as well in French as it does in English: "C'est la la vie." => "Il semble que le mot « la » soit utilisé deux foisde suite. Supprimez le second mot."