Français · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in French
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 French 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 French
French uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ê, é, è, ù.
If you already touch type English, most of French transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 4 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ê, é, è and ù — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A handful of words in this bank needs at least one.
Most people arrive at French able to type and unable to type French, 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.
Of the 26 characters these 64 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 14%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 26 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 64 common French words — 26 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 written units per word. The beginner course works outward from the home row in nine stages, and a drill is finished only when it has been typed cleanly three times — the default, adjustable in Settings. That repetition is the point: speed is a by-product of not making mistakes, and chasing it directly produces fast typists who then have to go back and fix everything.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 64
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters beyond a-z in the French practice words
- ê2
- é1
- è1
- ù1
Counted across the 64 practice words. 8% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ê, é, è or ù. 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 French 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.
le la de et les des en un une du que quiAZERTY, and the standard that tried to fix it
AZERTY is the French and Belgian layout, and it is genuinely awkward in ways French typists complain about constantly. Digits require the shift key, so typing a number is a two-key operation. Several characters French needs — ù, é, è, à, ç — have their own keys, while others, notably capital accented letters and the œ ligature, were historically difficult or impossible to type at all.
In 2019 AFNOR, the French standards body, published a revised AZERTY addressing most of this, alongside a standardised version of BÉPO — an ergonomic layout designed for French in the way Dvorak was designed for English. Adoption of both has been slow, which will surprise nobody.
The Belgian AZERTY differs from the French one in several positions, so the two are not interchangeable either. Canadian French uses a different arrangement again.
Questions about typing in French
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 French 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 French, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
Should I look at the keyboard while I learn?
No, and this is the one piece of advice worth being stubborn about. A glance down is not just a pause — it rehearses the habit of reading the keys instead of remembering them, which is precisely the habit the course exists to replace. Covering your hands for the first fortnight is unpleasant and works.
Do I need a French keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces ê, é, è and ù 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 French keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 64 practice words between them use 26 of those 30, 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.
What will I actually be typing in French?
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 64 common French words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is French hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 8% 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 64 French 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 French: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: German, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How long a typing test should beFifteen seconds, one minute and five minutes measure three different things. Which length to use, and why comparing results across them is meaningless.
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.