հայերեն · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Armenian
Home row anchors
Settle both hands on the home row: A S D F for the left, J K L ; for the right.
Physical key labels appear above. հայերեն layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 25 of the 35 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
Learning to type in Armenian
Armenian is written in its own script. The Armenian QWERTY layout maps 28 characters across the keys you already have, so every motion transfers and every letter moves.
Everyone learning Armenian passes through the same stage: typing by translation. You know the Armenian letter you want, you think of the Latin key it lives on, and then you press it — three steps where fluent typing has one. The middle step is what practice removes, and it goes faster if you refuse to look at the keyboard while it is going.
Expect a strange few days in Armenian where you are at once a competent typist and a beginner. Everything your hands know still works; everything your memory knows points at the wrong letters. It resolves in days rather than months, provided the practice is frequent rather than long.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 68% of everything you will type in these Armenian drills, and the remaining 25 share what is left. That is why the course introduces its material a little at a time rather than all at once: the early characters do a disproportionate amount of the work.
Nine stages take you from the home row outwards, adding a few keys at a time and drilling them as sequences rather than as words — the point at this stage is the position, not the vocabulary. Each stage holds several drills, and each drill wants three clean passes before it counts — by default, and Settings will change it: not three attempts, three clean ones. Slower at the start, considerably faster by the middle.
- Writing system
- Armenian
- Keyboard layout
- Armenian QWERTY
- Direction
- left to right
- Mapped characters
- 28
- Practice words
- 44
- Distinct characters
- 35
- Average word
- 3.9 units
Characters you will press most in these Armenian words
- ա33
- ր16
- ն14
- ե10
- կ10
- ո9
- ի7
- ղ6
- մ6
- տ6
- հ5
- ք5
Counted across the 44 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
հանգիստ ձեռքերը գլխավոր շարքը հեշտությամբ են գտնումThirty-nine letters and two orthographies
The Armenian alphabet was created around 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots and has 39 letters in its modern form. It is written left to right and, like Georgian, is unrelated to any neighbouring script.
Armenian is split between two standard forms: Eastern Armenian, used in Armenia and Iran, and Western Armenian, used across most of the diaspora. They differ in pronunciation and grammar, and Western Armenian retains the classical orthography while Eastern adopted a reformed spelling in the Soviet period. The letters are the same; some of the spellings are not.
Armenian punctuation is its own system: a question is marked with a symbol placed over the stressed vowel of the questioned word rather than at the end of the sentence, and the full stop is a colon-like mark.
Questions about typing in Armenian
Do I need an Armenian keyboard?
No. Switching your operating system to the Armenian QWERTY layout remaps the keyboard you already own; nothing physical changes. Stickers and printed keycaps exist, and they are worth skipping — they reward glancing down, which is the habit this whole exercise is trying to remove.
How long does learning to touch type in Armenian 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.
Why does a drill need three clean passes?
Because one correct attempt proves you can do it and three prove you can repeat it, which is the thing that eventually becomes automatic. Attempts with mistakes in them do not count towards the three — not as a punishment, but because practising an error is how an error becomes a habit. Three is the default rather than a rule: Settings will take it down to one or up to ten.
Which Armenian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Armenian QWERTY, with 28 characters mapped across the standard key positions. The 44 practice words between them reach every one of those 28 characters rather than a comfortable corner of the layout. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the physical key and the character it produces together, so you are never reading a layout diagram in one window while typing in another.
What will I actually be typing in Armenian?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — in Armenian as the Armenian QWERTY layout produces it, rather than transliterated into Latin letters. The point of the course is the position of a key rather than the vocabulary. The 44 common Armenian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Armenian hard to type?
Harder to start, not harder to reach. Every motion you already have transfers; what does not is the map, and 28 key positions have to be relearned. With a fairly compact inventory of 35 characters across the practice bank, most people are past the worst of it inside two weeks of short daily sessions.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 44 Armenian practice words, the speed test and all three games are the whole product, available immediately. Signing in is worth it only if you practise on more than one device.
Also in Armenian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages that move the alphabet onto the same keys: Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Tigrinya, Amharic. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guessTwo neighbouring scripts, each unrelated to anything around it, and two keyboards arranged by sound. How far that gets you, measured key by key.
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- What touch typing isTouch typing means typing without looking, using all ten fingers from a fixed home position. What it is, why it works, and what it is not.