Hrvatski · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Croatian
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 Croatian they produce the letters printed on them. The 4 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 Croatian
Croatian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — č, ć, š, ž.
Worth knowing before you start: these 43 words use 24 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 74% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
Croatian sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 4 more: č, ć, š and ž. 12% 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 speed test and the games draw on one bank of 43 common Croatian words — 24 distinct characters in all, averaging 4 written units per word. The lessons come at it from the other end. Nothing is generated on the fly and nothing is padded: each drill is a fixed sequence of the keys that stage has introduced, in an order that starts at the two index fingers and works outwards to the keys you reach for least.
Most people arrive at Croatian able to type and unable to type Croatian, which is a narrower problem than it feels. The letter keys are already done. What is left is a small number of positions, and the willingness to reach for them rather than paste them in.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 43
- Distinct characters
- 24
- Average word
- 4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Croatian practice words
- č2
- ć1
- š1
- ž1
Counted across the 43 practice words. 12% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include č, ć, š or ž. 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 4 characters Croatian 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.
mirne ruke lako pronalaze osnovni red tipkiDigraph letters, and a three-way spelling
Croatian uses a Latin alphabet of thirty letters, five of which are digraphs treated as single letters: dž, lj and nj, alphabetised as units, alongside č, ć, š, ž and đ.
The alphabet corresponds one-to-one with Serbian Cyrillic, which is why Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian text converts between the two scripts mechanically. The keyboard is QWERTZ, and the same layout serves all three.
đ deserves a note: it is a d with a stroke, a distinct letter, and it is routinely typed as dj by people whose keyboard lacks it — which is accepted informally and wrong formally.
Questions about typing in Croatian
Do I need a Croatian keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces č, ć, š and ž from the keys you have — through a dead key on some, a modifier such as right Alt on others. Which one depends on the language and on the layout you select; the hardware does not change either way.
Which Croatian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 43 practice words between them use 24 of those 30, so 6 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 Croatian?
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 43 common Croatian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Croatian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 12% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 4 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 to know Croatian 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 Croatian, 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.
How often should I practise Croatian?
Briefly and often. What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions, so ten minutes on most days will take you considerably further than an hour once a week. Stop while it is still going well — practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motion.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 43 Croatian 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 Croatian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Why your typing speed stopped improvingNearly everyone stalls somewhere in the middle. What causes a typing plateau, why more of the same practice does not clear it, and what does.
- Does your keyboard matter?Mechanical against membrane, laptop against desktop, split against straight. What genuinely changes your typing, what only changes how it feels.
- How long a typing test should beFifteen seconds, one minute and five minutes measure three different things. Which length to use, and why comparing results across them is meaningless.