Беларуская · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Belarusian
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. Беларуская layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 28 of the 30 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
Learning to type in Belarusian
Belarusian is written in the Cyrillic script. The Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН layout maps 31 characters across the keys you already have, so every motion transfers and every letter moves.
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 70 common Belarusian 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.
A Belarusian keyboard is a setting, not a purchase. Selecting the Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН layout in your operating system repoints 31 of the keys you already have at Cyrillic characters; nothing about the hardware changes. The guide below shows both faces of each key at once, the letter printed on the cap and the one it will actually write.
A glance at the keyboard costs more in Belarusian than in a language you already type, because it rehearses exactly the habit you are trying to replace: reading the keys instead of remembering them. Covering the keyboard for the first week is unpleasant advice that works.
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 Belarusian 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
- Cyrillic
- Keyboard layout
- Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН
- Direction
- left to right
- Mapped characters
- 31
- Practice words
- 70
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters you will press most in these Belarusian words
- а52
- о19
- р17
- к16
- і15
- д14
- л14
- н13
- т13
- м11
- ц11
- в10
Counted across the 70 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
спакойныя рукі знаходзяць асноўны рад без позіркуЎ, and a second orthography
Belarusian Cyrillic includes ў — a u with a breve, the short u — which no other Cyrillic alphabet uses and which is common enough in Belarusian that the city of Polatsk erected a monument to it. It is the letter that marks text as Belarusian at a glance.
Belarusian also has i where Russian has и, lacks щ and ъ, and uses an apostrophe as a letter-level character.
There are two orthographies in use. The official one dates from a 1933 reform; Taraškievica, the pre-reform spelling, remained in use in the diaspora and was revived domestically, and it represents assimilation in spelling where the official version does not. The letters are the same; the spellings differ, sometimes visibly.
Questions about typing in Belarusian
Do I need a Belarusian keyboard?
No hardware is needed. Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН is an operating-system layout, available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS without installing anything. The one thing worth setting up is a quick way to switch between it and your usual layout, because you will be doing that constantly.
Which Belarusian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН, with 31 characters mapped across the standard key positions. The 70 practice words between them use 30 of those 31, so the drills reach very nearly all of the layout rather than a comfortable corner. 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.
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 Belarusian 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 Belarusian, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
What will I actually be typing in Belarusian?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — in Cyrillic as the Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН 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 70 common Belarusian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Belarusian hard to type?
Harder to start, not harder to reach. Every motion you already have transfers; what does not is the map, and 31 key positions have to be relearned. With a fairly compact inventory of 30 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?
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 Belarusian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Cyrillic: Bulgarian, Kazakh, Macedonian, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboardsWhy the standard Russian layout ignores the letters on your keycaps, when a phonetic layout is defensible, and how far the eight Cyrillic layouts differ.
- The bottom rowZ X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.
- What counts as a good typing speedGood depends on what you type and how accurately. A guide to the bands, why accuracy beats speed, and what employers actually ask for.