Català · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Catalan
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 Catalan they produce the letters printed on them. The 5 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 Catalan
Catalan uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — é, í, è, ó, ò.
Catalan (Català) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 12% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 5 characters outside a-z: é, í, è, ó and ò. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
Progress is measured in clean passes, not time spent. Nine stages, a few drills each, three accurate repetitions per drill by default — and the counter does not move for an attempt with errors in it. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 100 common Catalan words — 28 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.3 written units per word.
Of the 28 characters these 100 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 14%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 28 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
The temptation in Catalan 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
- 100
- Distinct characters
- 28
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Catalan practice words
- é4
- í4
- è2
- ó1
- ò1
Counted across the 100 practice words. 12% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include é, í, è, ó and 1 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 5 characters Catalan 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.
el la de que i a en un per amb no elsThe middle dot in l·l
Catalan uses a punctuation mark almost nothing else does: the interpunct in l·l, a raised dot between two l's, which distinguishes a geminate l from the digraph ll that spells a different sound entirely. Paral·lel needs it; without it the word is misread.
It is a genuine orthographic character and it is frequently typed as a full stop, a hyphen or nothing at all, because reaching it on a keyboard is awkward. The Spanish layout provides it; a US layout does not.
Catalan also uses both accents — acute and grave — with the choice determined by vowel quality rather than position, which is a rule Spanish speakers learning Catalan reliably get wrong.
Questions about typing in Catalan
Do I need a Catalan keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — é, í, è, ó and ò — 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 Catalan keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 100 practice words between them use 28 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 keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
What will I actually be typing in Catalan?
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 100 common Catalan words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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 Catalan 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 Catalan, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
Should I look at the keyboard while I learn?
No, and this is the one piece of advice worth being stubborn about. A glance down is not just a pause — it rehearses the habit of reading the keys instead of remembering them, which is precisely the habit the course exists to replace. Covering your hands for the first fortnight is unpleasant and works.
Is Catalan hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 12% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 5 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 Catalan: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How to type fasterSix changes that raise typing speed, in the order worth making them. Most people's fastest gain is not typing faster — it is stopping mistakes.
- Average typing speedWhat the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.
- Typing postureMost posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.