Esperanto · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Esperanto
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 Esperanto 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 Esperanto
Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ŝ.
Esperanto is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 13% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 4 characters outside a-z: ŭ, ĉ, ĝ and ŝ. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 101 practice words, 25 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 13% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 75%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
Most people arrive at Esperanto able to type and unable to type Esperanto, 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.
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 101 common Esperanto 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 101
- Distinct characters
- 25
- Average word
- 4.2 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Esperanto practice words
- ŭ6
- ĉ3
- ĝ2
- ŝ2
Counted across the 101 practice words. 13% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ŭ, ĉ, ĝ or ŝ. 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 Esperanto 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.
kaj la de en al por ne estas kun tre multe boneSix accented letters and the workarounds they caused
Esperanto uses six letters with diacritics — ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ — that appear in no other language, which meant that for most of the twentieth century typing Esperanto properly was genuinely difficult. No typewriter had them and no early character encoding included them.
Two workarounds became conventions. The h-system, which Zamenhof himself proposed, writes ch, gh, hh, jh, sh and u. The x-system writes cx, gx, hx, jx, sx and ux, which is unambiguous because x is not otherwise an Esperanto letter, and is consequently what most software converts from.
Unicode settled the underlying problem, and the systems persist because keyboards did not follow. Most Esperanto typists still use an x-system converter rather than a dedicated layout.
Questions about typing in Esperanto
Do I need an Esperanto keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces ŭ, ĉ, ĝ and ŝ 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 Esperanto keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 101 practice words between them use 25 of those 30, 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.
Where should I start with Esperanto?
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 Esperanto 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 Esperanto 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.
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.
What will I actually be typing in Esperanto?
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 101 common Esperanto words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Esperanto hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 13% 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 an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 101 Esperanto 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 Esperanto: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Haitian Creole. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard layoutsQWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY, QWERTZ and the non-Latin layouts — what each one changes, and whether switching is worth it.
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.