Deutsch · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in German
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 German they produce the letters printed on them. The one character beyond a-z in the practice words here comes from a modifier or a dead key rather than a key of their own, so it is not shown here.
Learning to type in German
German uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 1 character beyond a-z — ü.
Nine stages take you from the home row outwards, adding a few keys at a time and drilling them as sequences rather than as words — the point at this stage is the position, not the vocabulary. Each stage holds several drills, and each drill wants three clean passes before it counts — by default, and Settings will change it: not three attempts, three clean ones. Slower at the start, considerably faster by the middle.
German (Deutsch) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 3% of the practice words here reach past them for the one character outside a-z: ü. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
Speed in German 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.
Worth knowing before you start: these 60 words use 23 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 75% 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 60
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 3.7 units
Characters beyond a-z in the German practice words
- ü2
Counted across the 60 practice words. 3% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include 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 one character German needs beyond them appears 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.
der die und in den von zu das mit sich des aufQWERTZ, ß, and a capital letter that arrived in 2017
German uses QWERTZ, which swaps Y and Z relative to QWERTY — Z is common in German and Y is rare, so it moves to the stronger hand — and adds ä, ö, ü and ß as dedicated keys to the right of the letter block.
ß, the sharp s, is the interesting one. For most of its history it had no capital form: a word set in capitals used SS instead. A capital ẞ was added to Unicode in 2008 and formally accepted into German orthography in 2017, and it is still not on most keyboards.
Switzerland uses a different QWERTZ again: the Swiss layout has no ß at all and handles German, French and Italian accents from one arrangement, since all three are national languages. A German keyboard and a Swiss one are not interchangeable.
Questions about typing in German
Do I need a German keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 1 character in the practice words here sits outside a-z, and it comes up in 3% of those words — often enough that copying it from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Do I need to know German 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 German, 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 German?
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.
Which German keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 1 character beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 60 practice words between them use 23 of those 27, 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 German?
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 60 common German words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is German hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 3% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, one such character appears 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 German: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
- Typing accented letters and symbolsDead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.