Polski · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Polish
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 Polish they produce the letters printed on them. The 6 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 Polish
Polish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 6 characters beyond a-z — ż, ę, ł, ć, ń and more.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 55 common Polish words — 27 distinct characters in all, averaging 4 written units per word. The lessons come at it from the other end. Nothing is generated on the fly and nothing is padded: each drill is a fixed sequence of the keys that stage has introduced, in an order that starts at the two index fingers and works outwards to the keys you reach for least.
Of the 27 characters these 55 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 9%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 27 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
Polish sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 6 more: ż, ę, ł, ć, ń and ś. 29% 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.
The temptation in Polish 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
- 55
- Distinct characters
- 27
- Average word
- 4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Polish practice words
- ż7
- ę4
- ł3
- ć2
- ń1
- ś1
Counted across the 55 practice words. 29% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ż, ę, ł, ć and 2 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 6 characters Polish 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.
i w nie na że to jest z do się jak aleThe programmer's layout that everyone uses
Polish has nine letters outside the basic Latin alphabet — ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż — and they are common enough that around a third of ordinary Polish words contain at least one.
There is a "Polish typist" layout that gives them dedicated keys, and essentially nobody uses it. The "Polish programmer's" layout won instead: it is plain QWERTY, and the nine letters are produced by holding right Alt and pressing the nearest plain letter — AltGr+a for ą, AltGr+l for ł, and so on. The single exception is ż, which is AltGr+z, leaving AltGr+x for ź.
It is an elegant solution for anyone who also types English, which is most Polish computer users, and it means a Polish keyboard is physically identical to a US one.
Questions about typing in Polish
Do I need a Polish keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ż, ę, ł, ć, ń and ś — 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 Polish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 6 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 55 practice words between them use 27 of those 32, 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 Polish?
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 Polish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Polish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 29% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 6 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.
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 Polish 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 Polish, 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.
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 Polish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- How to type fasterSix changes that raise typing speed, in the order worth making them. Most people's fastest gain is not typing faster — it is stopping mistakes.
- Average typing speedWhat the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.