Azərbaycan · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Azerbaijani
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 Azerbaijani they produce the letters printed on them. The 7 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 Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 7 characters beyond a-z — ə, ş, ü, ç, ı and more.
The course is deliberately narrow at the beginning: a handful of keys repeated until they are automatic, before anything is added. Nine stages later it has worked across the board, and 93 common Azerbaijani words are waiting in the speed test for when the positions stop needing thought. Skipping ahead is possible and usually a mistake, because the later stages assume the earlier ones are already automatic.
If you already touch type English, most of Azerbaijani transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 7 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ə, ş, ü, ç, ı and ö, and the rest of the set — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A large minority of words in this bank needs at least one.
Speed in Azerbaijani comes from prediction more than from finger speed: a familiar word is one motion, an unfamiliar one is a letter at a time. That is why drilling common words works — you are not training keys so much as the shapes the language keeps repeating.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 61% of everything these Azerbaijani words contain; past that you are learning characters that turn up once in a paragraph, which takes as long to automate and pays back far less often.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 93
- Distinct characters
- 29
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Azerbaijani practice words
- ə46
- ş14
- ü10
- ç7
- ı7
- ö6
- ğ1
Counted across the 93 practice words. 63% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ə, ş, ü, ç and 3 more. 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 7 characters Azerbaijani 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.
və bir bu o ki da üçün ilə çox az yaxşı böyükSchwa, and a third alphabet in a century
Azerbaijani has changed script three times in about a hundred years: Arabic until the 1920s, Latin briefly, Cyrillic under Soviet rule, and Latin again since 1991. The current alphabet is Turkish-derived with additions.
The most distinctive of those is ə, the schwa, which is a full letter and one of the most frequent in the language. It is unusual — most languages that need the sound spell it with an existing vowel — and it is the letter most likely to be missing from a keyboard that claims Azerbaijani support.
The layout also carries ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ş and ü, largely shared with Turkish, so a Turkish typist finds Azerbaijani familiar apart from the schwa.
Questions about typing in Azerbaijani
Do I need an Azerbaijani keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 7 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 63% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Azerbaijani keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 7 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 93 practice words between them use 29 of those 33, 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.
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.
Do I need to know Azerbaijani to use these lessons?
No. The material here is typing practice rather than a language course — you can work through it without understanding a word, and plenty of people do exactly that when they need to type a script for work. If you do speak Azerbaijani, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
What will I actually be typing in Azerbaijani?
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 93 common Azerbaijani words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Azerbaijani hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 63% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 7 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 account, no payment, no trial. Progress is stored in this browser, which is enough until you want it on a second device or on a leaderboard — that is the only thing an account buys, and it is optional.
Also in Azerbaijani: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Basque, Catalan, Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Danish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.