Magyar · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Hungarian
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 Hungarian they produce the letters printed on them. The 7 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 Hungarian
Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 7 characters beyond a-z — é, á, ő, ú, ó and more.
If you already touch type English, most of Hungarian transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 7 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — é, á, ő, ú, ó and ö, and the rest of the set — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A large minority of words in this bank needs at least one.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 43 common Hungarian words — 28 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 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.
Speed in Hungarian 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.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 43 practice words, 28 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 8% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 60%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 43
- Distinct characters
- 28
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Hungarian practice words
- é8
- á5
- ő3
- ú3
- ó2
- ö1
- ű1
Counted across the 43 practice words. 49% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include é, á, ő, ú and 3 more. 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 7 characters Hungarian 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.
nyugodt kezek könnyedén megtalálják az alaphelyzetetLong vowels, and a keyboard with room for all of them
Hungarian distinguishes vowel length in a way that changes meaning, and marks it with acute accents — á, é, í, ó, ú — plus two letters found in almost no other language: ő and ű, with double acute accents, which are the long forms of ö and ü.
The Hungarian QWERTZ layout gives all of them dedicated keys, which crowds the right-hand side of the keyboard considerably. There is no dead-key shortcut to learn; they are simply keys, and there are a lot of them.
Hungarian also treats several digraphs — cs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs — and the trigraph dzs as single letters for alphabetisation. That affects dictionaries rather than typing, but it explains why a Hungarian word looks longer than it sounds.
Questions about typing in Hungarian
Do I need a Hungarian keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 7 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 49% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Hungarian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 7 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 43 practice words between them use 28 of those 33, so 5 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 Hungarian?
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 43 common Hungarian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Hungarian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 49% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 7 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.
Where should I start with Hungarian?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Hungarian is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
How long does learning to touch type in Hungarian 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.
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 Hungarian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Latvian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- 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.