Čeština · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Czech
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 Czech they produce the letters printed on them. The 9 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 Czech
Czech uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 9 characters beyond a-z — ý, á, ě, ž, í and more.
The awkward part of Czech is not the alphabet, it is the 9 characters these practice words put outside it: ý, á, ě, ž, í, č, ď and ř and more. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 47% of the practice words.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 45 common Czech words — 30 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.5 written units per word. The beginner course works outward from the home row in nine stages, and a drill is finished only when it has been typed cleanly three times — the default, adjustable in Settings. That repetition is the point: speed is a by-product of not making mistakes, and chasing it directly produces fast typists who then have to go back and fix everything.
Speed in Czech 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.
Czech's 45-word bank draws on 30 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 9% of all letters typed, the rarest a fraction of one. The lessons follow that gradient deliberately, which is why the home row comes first and the awkward reaches come last.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 45
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 3.5 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Czech practice words
- ý9
- á3
- ě3
- ž3
- í2
- č1
- ď1
- ř1
- š1
Counted across the 45 practice words. 47% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ý, á, ě, ž and 5 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 9 characters Czech 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.
klidné ruce najdou domácí řadu bez nutnosti dívat seDiacritics on the number row
The Czech layout is QWERTZ, and it does something that startles people coming from English: the number row carries the accented letters — ě, š, č, ř, ž, ý, á, í, é — as unshifted keys. Digits require shift.
This is a defensible trade in a language where those letters are far more frequent than numerals, and it is intensely annoying for anyone typing numbers. Most Czech typists learn the number pad or switch layouts for data entry.
The háček, the small v-shaped mark, is handled by a dead key for the letters that do not get their own position. Slovak uses a closely related layout with its own set of letters, including the ĺ and ŕ that Czech does not have.
Questions about typing in Czech
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 Czech?
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.
Where should I start with Czech?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Czech is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
Do I need a Czech keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 9 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 47% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Czech keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 9 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 45 practice words between them use 30 of those 35, so 5 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 Czech?
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 45 common Czech words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Czech hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 47% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 9 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 Czech: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.