Eesti · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Estonian
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 Estonian 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 Estonian
Estonian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ä, ö, õ, ü.
Speed in Estonian 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.
Estonian sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 4 more: ä, ö, õ and ü. 24% of the practice words here need one — a steady minority — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
Progress is measured in clean passes, not time spent. Nine stages, a few drills each, three accurate repetitions per drill by default — and the counter does not move for an attempt with errors in it. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 94 common Estonian words — 23 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.4 written units per word.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 76% of everything you will type in these Estonian drills, and the remaining 13 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
- 94
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 4.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Estonian practice words
- ä11
- ö8
- õ8
- ü2
Counted across the 94 practice words. 24% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ä, ö, õ or ü. 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 Estonian 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.
ja on ei see ta ma aga kui ka mis oli siisÕ, and a language related to Finnish rather than its neighbours
Estonian is Finno-Ugric, closely related to Finnish and unrelated to the Latvian and Lithuanian spoken immediately to the south. Its keyboard, however, is Scandinavian in shape: ä, ö, ü and õ sit to the right of the letter block.
Õ is the distinctive one — a close-mid back unrounded vowel, a sound with no English equivalent, written as an o with a tilde. Finnish does not have it, so it is the letter that most immediately marks text as Estonian rather than Finnish.
Estonian distinguishes three degrees of length in both vowels and consonants, which is rare. Only two are written, so the third is carried by context and is one reason Estonian spelling looks simpler than the language is.
Questions about typing in Estonian
Do I need an Estonian 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 24% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Estonian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 94 practice words between them use 23 of those 30, so 7 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 Estonian?
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 94 common Estonian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
How long does learning to touch type in Estonian 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.
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.
Is Estonian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 24% 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 Estonian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hausa. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.
- 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.
- Average typing speedWhat the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.