Gaeilge · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Irish
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 Irish they produce the letters printed on them. The 5 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 Irish
Irish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — á, í, é, ó, ú.
Irish sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 5 more: á, í, é, ó and ú. 38% of the practice words here need one — a large minority of words — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 73% of everything these Irish words contain; past that you are learning characters that turn up once in a paragraph, which takes as long to automate and pays back far less often.
Most people arrive at Irish able to type and unable to type Irish, which is a narrower problem than it feels. The letter keys are already done. What is left is a small number of positions, and the willingness to reach for them rather than paste them in.
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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 87
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 4.7 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Irish practice words
- á13
- í8
- é7
- ó5
- ú1
Counted across the 87 practice words. 38% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include á, í, é, ó and 1 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 5 characters Irish 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.
agus an na ar is do le go ach tá níl mórThe fada, and the script Irish used to use
Modern Irish is written in the Latin alphabet with one diacritic, the síneadh fada — a long accent over a, e, i, o or u. It marks vowel length and changes meaning: seán and sean are different words, and getting it wrong in a name is noticed.
Until the mid-twentieth century Irish was commonly printed in the Gaelic script, an insular typeface with distinct letterforms and a dot above certain consonants to mark lenitation. The dot was replaced by a following h during the same reform that adopted Roman type, which is why modern Irish has so many h's in it.
The Irish keyboard is a UK layout; the fada is produced with AltGr and the vowel, or with a dead key, depending on the system.
Questions about typing in Irish
Do I need an Irish keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces á, í, é, ó and ú from the keys you have — through a dead key on some, a modifier such as right Alt on others. Which one depends on the language and on the layout you select; the hardware does not change either way.
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 to know Irish 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 Irish, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
Which Irish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 87 practice words between them use 23 of those 31, so 8 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 Irish?
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 87 common Irish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Irish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 38% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 5 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?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 87 Irish 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 Irish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Italian, Javanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
- 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.