Dansk · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Danish
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 Danish they produce the letters printed on them. The 2 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 Danish
Danish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — å, ø.
Nine stages take you from the home row outwards, adding a few keys at a time and drilling them as sequences rather than as words — the point at this stage is the position, not the vocabulary. Each stage holds several drills, and each drill wants three clean passes before it counts — by default, and Settings will change it: not three attempts, three clean ones. Slower at the start, considerably faster by the middle.
One number is worth carrying into the first session. About 71% of the letters in these Danish words come from just ten characters. Get those ten genuinely automatic — not merely findable — and the rest of the layout stops being the thing standing between you and a readable sentence.
If you already touch type English, most of Danish transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 2 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — å and ø — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A handful of words in this bank needs at least one.
The temptation in Danish 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
- 48
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 3.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Danish practice words
- å6
- ø1
Counted across the 48 practice words. 13% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include å or ø. 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 2 characters Danish 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.
rolige hænder finder hjemmerækken uden at se nedThe same three letters as Norwegian, and a very different sound
Danish shares æ, ø and å with Norwegian and uses the same keyboard layout, so the two are mechanically identical to type. The written languages are close enough that Danes and Norwegians read each other with little difficulty.
Spoken Danish is another matter, and its reputation for being hard to hear is well earned: Danish has undergone extensive consonant weakening, so written and spoken forms have drifted a long way apart. The stød, a glottal catch that distinguishes word pairs, is not written at all.
For a typist none of that matters. What does is that Danish spelling retains silent letters the pronunciation lost, so words are longer on the page than in the ear.
Questions about typing in Danish
Do I need a Danish keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — å and ø — 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.
How often should I practise Danish?
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 Danish?
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 Danish 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.
How long does learning to touch type in Danish take?
Longer than a week and shorter than you fear — and it depends far more on how often you practise than on how long each session runs. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones by a wide margin, because what you are building is recall and recall decays between sessions. The streak counter exists for that reason.
Which Danish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 2 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 48 practice words between them use 23 of those 28, 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 Danish?
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 48 common Danish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Danish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 13% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 2 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 Danish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
- Typing accented letters and symbolsDead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.
- Typing accuracyWhat an accuracy percentage really means, why an error costs more than one keystroke, and how to fix accuracy without simply slowing down forever.