Română · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Romanian
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 Romanian 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 Romanian
Romanian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — ă, ș, î, â, ț.
Speed in Romanian 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.
If you already touch type English, most of Romanian transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 5 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ă, ș, î, â and ț — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A steady minority in this bank needs at least one.
Nine stages take you from the home row outwards, adding a few keys at a time and drilling them as sequences rather than as words — the point at this stage is the position, not the vocabulary. Each stage holds several drills, and each drill wants three clean passes before it counts — by default, and Settings will change it: not three attempts, three clean ones. Slower at the start, considerably faster by the middle.
Romanian's 43-word bank draws on 23 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 13% of all letters typed, the rarest a fraction of one. The lessons follow that gradient deliberately, which is why the home row comes first and the awkward reaches come last.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 43
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 3.7 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Romanian practice words
- ă7
- ș4
- î3
- â2
- ț1
Counted across the 43 practice words. 33% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ă, ș, î, â 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 Romanian 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.
mâinile calme găsesc rândul de bază fără efortComma below, not cedilla — a distinction that took Unicode years
Romanian uses ă, â, î, ș and ț. The last two are the interesting ones: the mark beneath s and t is properly a comma, not a cedilla, and for years the only widely available characters were the cedilla forms ş and ţ borrowed from Turkish.
Unicode added the correct comma-below characters in 1999 and font support lagged for a decade, so a great deal of older Romanian text uses the Turkish letters. Both still circulate, and searching Romanian text often means searching for both.
Romanian is the only Romance language in the region — surrounded by Slavic and Hungarian speakers — and it was written in Cyrillic until the nineteenth century.
Questions about typing in Romanian
Do I need a Romanian keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 5 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 33% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
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 Romanian?
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 Romanian?
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 Romanian 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.
Which Romanian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 43 practice words between them use 23 of those 31, so 8 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 Romanian?
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 43 common Romanian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Romanian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 33% 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?
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 Romanian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.