Nederlands · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Dutch
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 Dutch they produce exactly the letters printed on them — nothing is remapped and nothing is hidden behind a modifier.
Learning to type in Dutch
Dutch is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
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 50 common Dutch 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.
Because none of these practice words leaves a-z, the skill you build here is portable. Learn the 50-word bank cleanly and the same hand positions serve every other Latin-alphabet language on this site — the keys do not move, only the words on top of them do.
The plateau in Dutch is almost always the same thing: looking down. It feels faster and it caps you, because a glance is a pause plus a re-find. Nothing here can stop you doing it — but a drill you did not type cleanly will not be counted, which helps.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 76% of everything these Dutch 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
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 50
- Distinct characters
- 22
- Average word
- 3.5 units
Characters you will press most in these Dutch words
- e22
- a18
- n18
- o15
- i13
- d12
- r10
- t10
- l7
- w6
- g5
- k5
Counted across the 50 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
de het een van en in is op te dat die nietA digraph that is sometimes one letter
Dutch is typed on a US QWERTY keyboard almost universally — the Netherlands has a national layout and essentially nobody uses it, making Dutch one of the few European languages where the local standard lost outright.
The interesting thing about Dutch is IJ. The combination behaves as a single letter in several respects: when a word beginning with it is capitalised, both letters capitalise — IJsland, not Ijsland — and in handwriting and some typography it is written as one character. Unicode includes a combined ij, and it is rarely used.
Dutch also uses the trema — ë, ï, ö, ü — not to mark a different sound but to show that a vowel starts a new syllable, as in coördinatie. It is the same mark English uses in naïve, doing a slightly different job.
Questions about typing in Dutch
Do I need a Dutch keyboard?
No. This is one of the few languages where the answer is genuinely "nothing to set up": the 22 distinct characters in the practice bank are all letters already printed on your keys.
Which Dutch keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 50 practice words between them use 22 of those 26, so 4 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.
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 Dutch 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 Dutch, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
What will I actually be typing in Dutch?
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 50 common Dutch words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Dutch hard to type?
No — Dutch is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 22 characters across the practice bank, and every key already under your fingers. Whatever difficulty you meet is the difficulty of touch typing itself, not of this language.
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 Dutch: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French. 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.
- 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.
- Typing codeCode is symbol-dense, punctuation-heavy and hard on the little fingers. Why fast prose typists are often mediocre code typists, and what to drill.