TIMED PRACTICE · Esperanto
Esperanto typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Esperanto typing speed
Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ŝ.
Speed in Esperanto 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.
Esperanto sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 4 more: ŭ, ĉ, ĝ and ŝ. 13% 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 test is configurable rather than fixed — 15 seconds to 10 minutes, or a set number of words, or your own pasted text. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 101 common Esperanto words — 25 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.2 written units per word. Every run samples it again. The summary separates raw speed from net speed, so you can see exactly what your errors cost you.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 75% of everything you will type in these Esperanto drills, and the remaining 15 share what is left. That is why the course introduces its material a little at a time rather than all at once: the early characters do a disproportionate amount of the work.
- 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.
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, though you do need the right layout selected. 4 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 13% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Esperanto keyboard layout do these tests 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.
What will I actually be typing in Esperanto?
101 of the most common words in Esperanto, drawn at random. They use 25 distinct characters between them and average 4.2 written units each, with the longest running to about 9. Short, frequent words are used on purpose: they are the ones your hands will meet most often outside a lesson, so the practice transfers.
How is typing speed measured here?
In words per minute, where a "word" is a fixed five characters rather than an actual word. That convention is what makes a WPM figure comparable between languages whose real words are very different lengths. The number reported is net WPM: uncorrected mistakes are subtracted, so it reflects text you actually produced correctly.
Why is my Esperanto speed lower than my English speed?
Because you are doing two things at once: finding the key and recalling what it writes. Speed in a script you have typed for years is one motion; speed in a new one is a lookup followed by a motion. The lookup is what disappears with practice, and when it does the gap closes faster than most people expect.
Is the Esperanto typing test the same every time?
No. Words are drawn at random from the Esperanto bank on every run, so there is nothing to memorise and a second attempt is a fresh test rather than a rehearsal. You can fix the duration or the word count, turn punctuation and numbers on, or paste your own text.
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?
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 Esperanto: lessons 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.