Lëtzebuergesch · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Luxembourgish
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 Luxembourgish they produce the letters printed on them. The 3 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 Luxembourgish
Luxembourgish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — ë, é, ä.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 93 common Luxembourgish words — 26 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.7 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.
Luxembourgish sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 3 more: ë, é and ä. 18% of the practice words here need one — a steady minority — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
Speed in Luxembourgish 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.
One number is worth carrying into the first session. About 68% of the letters in these Luxembourgish words come from just ten characters. Get those ten genuinely automatic — not merely findable — and the rest of the layout stops being the thing standing between you and a readable sentence.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 93
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 4.7 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Luxembourgish practice words
- ë8
- é5
- ä4
Counted across the 93 practice words. 18% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ë, é or ä. 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 3 characters Luxembourgish 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.
an den ass vun mat fir net esou vill gutt grouss klengA national language standardised in 1984
Luxembourgish became an official language of Luxembourg only in 1984, alongside French and German, and its spelling was standardised around the same time. Before that it was largely a spoken language written ad hoc.
It uses ä, ë and é, and the keyboard question is genuinely awkward: Luxembourg uses the Swiss French layout, which is designed for French and German rather than Luxembourgish, so the letters the language actually needs are not especially well placed.
Most Luxembourgers write in three languages daily — Luxembourgish informally, French administratively, German in the press — which is a keyboard problem as much as a linguistic one.
Questions about typing in Luxembourgish
How often should I practise Luxembourgish?
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.
Where should I start with Luxembourgish?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Luxembourgish is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
How long does learning to touch type in Luxembourgish 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.
Do I need a Luxembourgish keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 3 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 18% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Luxembourgish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 93 practice words between them use 26 of those 29, so 3 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 Luxembourgish?
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 93 common Luxembourgish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Luxembourgish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 18% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 3 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 Luxembourgish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Malay, Maltese, Māori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- 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.