Afrikaans · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Afrikaans
Home row anchors
Settle both hands on the home row: A S D F for the left, J K L ; for the right.
These are the keys you press, and in Afrikaans they produce the letters printed on them. The 3 characters beyond a-z in the practice words here come from a modifier or a dead key rather than a key of their own, so they are not shown here.
Learning to type in Afrikaans
Afrikaans uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — ê, ô, ë.
Afrikaans sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 3 more: ê, ô and ë. 6% of the practice words here need one — a handful of words — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 102 practice words, 25 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 13% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 73%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 102 common Afrikaans words — 25 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.1 written units per word. The beginner course works outward from the home row in nine stages, and a drill is finished only when it has been typed cleanly three times — the default, adjustable in Settings. That repetition is the point: speed is a by-product of not making mistakes, and chasing it directly produces fast typists who then have to go back and fix everything.
The temptation in Afrikaans is to skip the accents while drilling and add them later. It does not work — the accent is part of the motion, and a hand that has practised the word without it has practised a different word. Drill them from the start, awkward as the first week is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 102
- Distinct characters
- 25
- Average word
- 4.1 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Afrikaans practice words
- ê3
- ô2
- ë1
Counted across the 102 practice words. 6% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ê, ô or ë. The beginner course builds each drill by remapping the keys through a language’s layout, and there is no key map for Latin QWERTY family yet — so these stages work through the plain a-z letters. The 3 characters Afrikaans needs beyond them appear in the speed test and the games, which draw on the word bank, and the keyboard guide above shows where they sit on the layout you have selected. It is one of the two things most worth fixing here; the other is that 2 languages have no layout map at all.
kalm hande vind die tuisry sonder om te kykDutch spelling, simplified and then some
Afrikaans descends from seventeenth-century Dutch and has a considerably simpler spelling system, having dropped most of Dutch's inflection and regularised much of its orthography. A Dutch reader can read Afrikaans; the reverse is also largely true.
It uses the circumflex on ê, î, ô and û, the diaeresis on ë and ï, and the acute for emphasis. The most distinctive orthographic feature is the apostrophe in the indefinite article 'n, which is written lowercase even at the start of a sentence — so a sentence can begin 'n Man, with the capital falling on the second word.
A standard US or UK keyboard with a dead key covers Afrikaans without difficulty, which is what most Afrikaans typists use.
Questions about typing in Afrikaans
Where should I start with Afrikaans?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Afrikaans is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
How long does learning to touch type in Afrikaans take?
Longer than a week and shorter than you fear — and it depends far more on how often you practise than on how long each session runs. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones by a wide margin, because what you are building is recall and recall decays between sessions. The streak counter exists for that reason.
Can I skip ahead to a later stage?
Yes, nothing is locked. It is usually a mistake, though, because each stage assumes the keys before it have stopped needing thought — and a stage practised on top of a shaky one tends to embed the shakiness rather than fix it.
Do I need an Afrikaans keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ê, ô and ë — are reachable on the keyboard you already own once the right layout is selected in your operating system's settings. Some layouts give them their own keys, others build them from a modifier; either way the hardware is unchanged.
Which Afrikaans keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 102 practice words between them use 25 of those 29, so 4 characters never come up in the practice text — these are the commonest words rather than an even sweep of the layout. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
What will I actually be typing in Afrikaans?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — written in the Latin QWERTY family layout. The point of the course is the position of a key rather than the vocabulary. The 102 common Afrikaans words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Afrikaans hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 6% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 3 such characters appear in total, and the rest is a keyboard you already know. The difficulty is concentrated in a handful of positions rather than spread across the layout.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
No, and it is free either way. Every lesson, drill, test and game works signed out, with your progress kept in this browser. An account adds three things only: your progress and settings follow you to another device, your streak survives clearing your browser data, and you can appear on the leaderboards under a name you choose.
Also in Afrikaans: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Cebuano, Croatian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.