title_body: Klingon: does anyone actually use pIqaD, or is the Latin transliteration sufficient? Having just started the Duolingo Klingon course, I'm wondering if anybody is using the Klingon writing system (pIqaD) at all, or whether the Latin transliteration is always used?
  
  As the characters look pretty hard to learn for someone with a Western background, I tend towards the transliteration only; I guess one issue is a cursive (ie handwriting) script, as the original characters seem hard to write by hand.
upvoted_answer: The official Klingon orthography according to the Klingon Language Institute is the Latin transcription. It is what Marc Okrand, the language's creator, developed and uses.
  
  The Klingon script used in from Star Trek: the Next Generation on, known as the Okuda script (Michael Okuda was the set designer for Next Generation), is used, but it's worth noting that while the sounds of Klingon have been mapped onto these letters, the movies and shows just put random jumbles of letters on signs and things (this may not be true of Star Trek: Discovery, however -- I've heard they may actually have translated the signage). It's also not the only Klingon script to have been used -- according to an article in HolQeD, the Klingon Language Institute's journal, the 1980 U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual (now out of print) featured a completely different Klingon script, though this one was a mere way of encoding English text rather than being mapped onto Klingon phonemes (Okrand did not publish The Klingon Dictionary until 1985, after all). 
  
  Given this sort of background, you can by no means take for granted that the Okuda script is the "real" Klingon pIqaD, even though it will be occasionally used to write Klingon. The Okrand transliteration is the only truly official orthography.
  
  In any case, resources and activities written in Klingon are more often written using the official Okrand transliteration than with the Okuda script -- the Klingon subtitles on Star Trek: Discovery, for one example, are in the transliteration (can't make Unicode add new characters for such things, after all!) In general, you'll be fine with just the transliteration -- in fact, you may have an easier time, as the transliteration is easy to type. That said, no one will judge you if you use the Okuda script because you want the writing to feel less Terran or something.