Português · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Portuguese
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 Portuguese they produce the letters printed on them. The 5 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 Portuguese
Portuguese uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — á, é, à, ã, ó.
The awkward part of Portuguese is not the alphabet, it is the 5 characters these practice words put outside it: á, é, à, ã and ó. 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 16% of the practice words.
Worth knowing before you start: these 57 words use 26 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 78% 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.
Most people arrive at Portuguese able to type and unable to type Portuguese, which is a narrower problem than it feels. The letter keys are already done. What is left is a small number of positions, and the willingness to reach for them rather than paste them in.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 57 common Portuguese words — 26 distinct characters in all, averaging 3 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 57
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Portuguese practice words
- á3
- é3
- à1
- ã1
- ó1
Counted across the 57 practice words. 16% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include á, é, à, ã and 1 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 5 characters Portuguese 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.
de a o que e do da em um para é comTwo layouts, one for Brazil and one for Portugal
Brazilian Portuguese uses ABNT2, a Brazilian standard that gives ç its own key and includes an extra key in the bottom row that most keyboards do not have — 107 keys rather than the usual 104. European Portuguese uses a different layout, closer to the Spanish one.
Portuguese is diacritically busy: acute, circumflex, grave and the tilde on ã and õ, all typed with dead keys. The tilde over a vowel marks nasalisation and is not decorative — pão and pau are unrelated words.
The 1990 Orthographic Agreement aligned Brazilian and European spelling in several respects, but the keyboards were not part of the deal and remain distinct.
Questions about typing in Portuguese
Do I need to know Portuguese 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 Portuguese, 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 Portuguese?
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.
Do I need a Portuguese keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces á, é, à, ã and ó from the keys you have — through a dead key on some, a modifier such as right Alt on others. Which one depends on the language and on the layout you select; the hardware does not change either way.
Which Portuguese keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 57 practice words between them use 26 of those 31, 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 Portuguese?
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 57 common Portuguese words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Portuguese hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 16% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 5 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?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 57 Portuguese practice words, the speed test and all three games are the whole product, available immediately. Signing in is worth it only if you practise on more than one device.
Also in Portuguese: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing postureMost posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.
- 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.