Íslenska · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Icelandic
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 Icelandic they produce the letters printed on them. The 10 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 Icelandic
Icelandic uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 10 characters beyond a-z — ð, ó, í, á, ö and more.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 94 common Icelandic words — 30 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.1 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.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 64% of everything you will type in these Icelandic drills, and the remaining 20 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.
Icelandic (Íslenska) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 43% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 10 characters outside a-z: ð, ó, í, á, ö, ú, æ and ý, among others. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The temptation in Icelandic 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
- 94
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 4.1 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Icelandic practice words
- ð11
- ó8
- í6
- á4
- ö4
- ú3
- æ2
- ý2
- þ2
- é1
Counted across the 94 practice words. 43% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ð, ó, í, á and 6 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 10 characters Icelandic 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.
og að í er á um ekki en það sem við meðÞorn and eth, still in use
Icelandic retains two letters that English used and abandoned: þ (thorn) and ð (eth), both representing sounds English now spells "th". Thorn survived in English long enough to be mangled by printers who substituted the letter y, which is where the mock-archaic "Ye Olde" comes from — it was always pronounced "the".
Icelandic also uses æ, ö and acute accents on all six vowels, which are separate letters rather than marked versions of the plain ones. The Icelandic keyboard gives þ, ð, æ and ö their own keys.
The alphabet has 32 letters and omits c, q, w and z, so an Icelandic keyboard has keys most Icelandic words never need — a concession to everyone also typing English.
Questions about typing in Icelandic
How long does learning to touch type in Icelandic 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.
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 an Icelandic keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ð, ó, í, á, ö and ú 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 Icelandic keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 10 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 94 practice words between them use 30 of those 36, so 6 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 Icelandic?
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 94 common Icelandic words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Icelandic hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 43% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 10 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 Icelandic: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Latvian, Lithuanian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Does your keyboard matter?Mechanical against membrane, laptop against desktop, split against straight. What genuinely changes your typing, what only changes how it feels.
- 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.