Italiano · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Italian
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 Italian they produce the letters printed on them. The 2 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 Italian
Italian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — è, ù.
Speed in Italian 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 awkward part of Italian is not the alphabet, it is the 2 characters these practice words put outside it: è and ù. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 4% of the practice words.
The course is deliberately narrow at the beginning: a handful of keys repeated until they are automatic, before anything is added. Nine stages later it has worked across the board, and 55 common Italian words are waiting in the speed test for when the positions stop needing thought. Skipping ahead is possible and usually a mistake, because the later stages assume the earlier ones are already automatic.
Of the 21 characters these 55 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 16%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 21 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 55
- Distinct characters
- 21
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Italian practice words
- è1
- ù1
Counted across the 55 practice words. 4% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include è or ù. 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 2 characters Italian 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.
il di che e la per un in con del non unaAccents with their own keys, and no dead keys at all
Italian marks stress on the final vowel of a good many words — città, perché, così — and the Italian keyboard gives à, è, é, ì, ò and ù dedicated keys along the right-hand side rather than using dead keys. Typing them is one press.
The trade is that capital accented letters are awkward: the Italian layout historically made È and the rest difficult to produce, which is why Italian text sometimes writes E' with an apostrophe instead. It is a workaround everyone recognises and nobody defends.
Italian also has no k, j, w, x or y in native words. They appear only in loanwords and foreign names, which means a good deal of the keyboard sees very little Italian use.
Questions about typing in Italian
Do I need an Italian keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 2 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 4% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Italian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 2 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 55 practice words between them use 21 of those 28, so 7 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.
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 Italian 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 Italian, 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.
What will I actually be typing in Italian?
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 55 common Italian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Italian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 4% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 2 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 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 Italian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Javanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maltese. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- Typing accuracyWhat an accuracy percentage really means, why an error costs more than one keystroke, and how to fix accuracy without simply slowing down forever.
- Keyboard layoutsQWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY, QWERTZ and the non-Latin layouts — what each one changes, and whether switching is worth it.