TIMED PRACTICE · Magyar
Hungarian typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Hungarian typing speed
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.
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. Nothing about the test is fixed except the fairness of it: the same bank, sampled fresh, so a result today is comparable with a result next month. Duration, word count, punctuation and digits are all yours to set.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 60% of everything you will type in these Hungarian drills, and the remaining 18 share what is left. That is why the course introduces its material a little at a time rather than all at once: the early characters do a disproportionate amount of the work.
Hungarian (Magyar) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 49% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 7 characters outside a-z: é, á, ő, ú, ó, ö and ű. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The temptation in Hungarian 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
- 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.
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
How is typing speed measured here?
In words per minute, where a "word" is a fixed five characters rather than an actual word. That convention is what makes a WPM figure comparable between languages whose real words are very different lengths. The number reported is net WPM: uncorrected mistakes are subtracted, so it reflects text you actually produced correctly.
Why is my Hungarian speed lower than my English speed?
Because you are doing two things at once: finding the key and recalling what it writes. Speed in a script you have typed for years is one motion; speed in a new one is a lookup followed by a motion. The lookup is what disappears with practice, and when it does the gap closes faster than most people expect.
Is the Hungarian typing test the same every time?
No. Words are drawn at random from the Hungarian bank on every run, so there is nothing to memorise and a second attempt is a fresh test rather than a rehearsal. You can fix the duration or the word count, turn punctuation and numbers on, or paste your own text.
Do I need a Hungarian keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — é, á, ő, ú, ó and ö and others — 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 Hungarian keyboard layout do these tests 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?
43 of the most common words in Hungarian, drawn at random. They use 28 distinct characters between them and average 3.6 written units each, with the longest running to about 6. Short, frequent words are used on purpose: they are the ones your hands will meet most often outside a lesson, so the practice transfers.
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.
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 Hungarian: lessons 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.