Suomi · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Finnish
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 Finnish 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 Finnish
Finnish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — ä, ö.
The awkward part of Finnish is not the alphabet, it is the 2 characters these practice words put outside it: ä and ö. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 29% of the practice words.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 75% of everything these Finnish 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.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 45 common Finnish words — 19 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.3 written units per word. The lessons come at it from the other end. Nothing is generated on the fly and nothing is padded: each drill is a fixed sequence of the keys that stage has introduced, in an order that starts at the two index fingers and works outwards to the keys you reach for least.
The temptation in Finnish 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
- 45
- Distinct characters
- 19
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Finnish practice words
- ä17
- ö2
Counted across the 45 practice words. 29% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ä or ö. 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 Finnish 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.
rauhalliset kädet löytävät kotirivin helpostiLong words, doubled letters, and almost no consonant clusters
Finnish is agglutinative and case-heavy — fifteen cases, expressed as suffixes — so words are long and a single Finnish word often translates as an English phrase. Typing Finnish means typing fewer, longer words than almost any other language here.
It also doubles letters meaningfully. Both vowels and consonants can be short or long, and length is written by doubling: tuli is fire, tuuli is wind, tulli is customs. A doubled letter is not emphasis; it is a different word, so accuracy matters in a way it does not in languages where a stray repeat is obviously a typo.
Finnish uses ä and ö, on the Swedish/Finnish keyboard, and native Finnish words avoid consonant clusters at the start of a word — which is why loanwords historically lost their first consonant: strand became ranta.
Questions about typing in Finnish
Do I need a Finnish keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ä and ö — 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.
Which Finnish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 2 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 45 practice words between them use 19 of those 28, so 9 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 Finnish?
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 45 common Finnish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Finnish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 29% 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.
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 Finnish 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 Finnish, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
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 Finnish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: French, German, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hungarian, Icelandic. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing postureMost posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.
- Why your typing speed stopped improvingNearly everyone stalls somewhere in the middle. What causes a typing plateau, why more of the same practice does not clear it, and what does.
- Does your keyboard matter?Mechanical against membrane, laptop against desktop, split against straight. What genuinely changes your typing, what only changes how it feels.