Norsk · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Norwegian
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 Norwegian 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 Norwegian
Norwegian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — å, ø.
Norwegian (Norsk) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 17% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 2 characters outside a-z: å and ø. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
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 48 common Norwegian words — 23 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.4 written units per word.
Speed in Norwegian 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.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 71% of everything these Norwegian 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 48
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 3.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Norwegian practice words
- å8
- ø1
Counted across the 48 practice words. 17% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include å or ø. 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 Norwegian 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.
rolige hender finner hjemraden uten å se nedÆ, Ø, Å — and two written standards
Norwegian uses æ, ø and å, placed at the end of the alphabet after z, with their own keys to the right of the letter block. The layout is shared with Danish, which uses the same three letters.
Norway has two official written standards for the same spoken language: Bokmål, derived from Danish and used by the large majority, and Nynorsk, assembled in the nineteenth century from rural dialects. Both are taught in schools and both appear in official documents. These lessons use Bokmål.
The å is a relatively recent arrival in Norwegian and Danish — it replaced aa in the twentieth century — which is why Danish place names like Aalborg still appear both ways.
Questions about typing in Norwegian
Do I need a Norwegian 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 17% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Norwegian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 2 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 48 practice words between them use 23 of those 28, so 5 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 Norwegian?
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 48 common Norwegian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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 Norwegian 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 Norwegian, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
Is Norwegian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 17% 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 Norwegian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard layoutsQWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY, QWERTZ and the non-Latin layouts — what each one changes, and whether switching is worth it.
- 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.