ქართული · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Georgian
Home row anchors
Settle both hands on the home row: A S D F for the left, J K L ; for the right.
Physical key labels appear above. ქართული layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 24 of the 28 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
Learning to type in Georgian
Georgian is written in its own script. The Georgian QWERTY layout maps 31 characters across the keys you already have, so every motion transfers and every letter moves.
Worth knowing before you start: these 45 words use 28 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 74% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
Georgian uses the Georgian alphabet, so a Georgian QWERTY keyboard puts a different letter under every finger you already know. 31 keys are remapped, and that is the entire difficulty: the motions are the ones you have, aimed at different letters.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 45 common Georgian words — 28 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.6 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.
Expect a strange few days in Georgian where you are at once a competent typist and a beginner. Everything your hands know still works; everything your memory knows points at the wrong letters. It resolves in days rather than months, provided the practice is frequent rather than long.
- Writing system
- Georgian
- Keyboard layout
- Georgian QWERTY
- Direction
- left to right
- Mapped characters
- 31
- Practice words
- 45
- Distinct characters
- 28
- Average word
- 4.6 units
Characters you will press most in these Georgian words
- ა38
- ი31
- ე15
- ლ13
- მ11
- რ11
- ხ10
- ვ9
- ო7
- ს7
- დ6
- ც5
Counted across the 45 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
მშვიდი ხელები პოულობენ სახლის რიგს პრაქტიკითAn alphabet with no capital letters
Mkhedruli, the modern Georgian script, has no case distinction. There are no capital letters, so no shift key for letters, no capitalisation of names or sentence beginnings, and none of the case-conversion problems that occupy so much software elsewhere.
It has 33 letters, each representing exactly one sound, in a writing system that has been in continuous use for around 1,600 years and is unrelated to any other script. Two earlier Georgian alphabets, Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri, survive in ecclesiastical use; together the three are on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list.
The layout used here maps Georgian letters onto QWERTY positions phonetically, which is the common arrangement.
Questions about typing in Georgian
Do I need a Georgian keyboard?
No. Switching your operating system to the Georgian QWERTY layout remaps the keyboard you already own; nothing physical changes. Stickers and printed keycaps exist, and they are worth skipping — they reward glancing down, which is the habit this whole exercise is trying to remove.
Which Georgian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Georgian QWERTY, with 31 characters mapped across the standard key positions. The 45 practice words between them use 28 of those 31, so the drills reach very nearly all of the layout rather than a comfortable corner. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the physical key and the character it produces together, so you are never reading a layout diagram in one window while typing in another.
What will I actually be typing in Georgian?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — in Georgian as the Georgian QWERTY layout produces it, rather than transliterated into Latin letters. The point of the course is the position of a key rather than the vocabulary. The 45 common Georgian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Georgian hard to type?
Harder to start, not harder to reach. Every motion you already have transfers; what does not is the map, and 31 key positions have to be relearned. With a fairly compact inventory of 28 characters across the practice bank, most people are past the worst of it inside two weeks of short daily sessions.
Do I need to know Georgian 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 Georgian, 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.
How often should I practise Georgian?
Briefly and often. What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions, so ten minutes on most days will take you considerably further than an hour once a week. Stop while it is still going well — practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motion.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 45 Georgian 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 Georgian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages that move the alphabet onto the same keys: Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Tigrinya, Amharic, Armenian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guessTwo neighbouring scripts, each unrelated to anything around it, and two keyboards arranged by sound. How far that gets you, measured key by key.
- 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.