Latviešu · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Latvian
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 Latvian they produce the letters printed on them. The 9 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 Latvian
Latvian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 9 characters beyond a-z — ē, ā, ī, ļ, š and more.
If you already touch type English, most of Latvian transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 9 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ē, ā, ī, ļ, š and ū, 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.
Worth knowing before you start: these 90 words use 29 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 66% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
Progress is measured in clean passes, not time spent. Nine stages, a few drills each, three accurate repetitions per drill by default — and the counter does not move for an attempt with errors in it. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 90 common Latvian words — 29 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.6 written units per word.
The temptation in Latvian 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
- 90
- Distinct characters
- 29
- Average word
- 4.6 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Latvian practice words
- ē18
- ā16
- ī10
- ļ2
- š2
- ū2
- ģ1
- ņ1
- ž1
Counted across the 90 practice words. 50% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ē, ā, ī, ļ and 5 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 9 characters Latvian 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.
un ir ka ar uz no par bet kad ja jau vēlMacrons for length, and a keyboard nobody uses
Latvian marks long vowels with a macron — ā, ē, ī, ū — and palatalisation with a cedilla-like mark on ģ, ķ, ļ and ņ, plus č, š and ž with the háček. That is eleven letters beyond the basic alphabet, in a language that also omits q, w, x and y.
Latvia has an official ergonomic keyboard layout designed for the language, and almost nobody uses it. Most Latvian typists use a US QWERTY keyboard with a dead-key apostrophe: press the apostrophe, then the letter, and the mark appears. It is a workaround that has quietly become the standard.
Latvian and Lithuanian are the only two surviving Baltic languages and are the most archaic living Indo-European languages, which is a linguist's observation rather than a typist's.
Questions about typing in Latvian
Do I need a Latvian keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ē, ā, ī, ļ, š and ū 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 Latvian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 9 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 90 practice words between them use 29 of those 35, 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 Latvian?
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 90 common Latvian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Do I need to know Latvian 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 Latvian, 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.
How often should I practise Latvian?
Briefly and often. What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions, so ten minutes on most days will take you considerably further than an hour once a week. Stop while it is still going well — practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motion.
Is Latvian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 50% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 9 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 Latvian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maltese, Māori, Norwegian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.