WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Cyrillic
8 languages here are written in Cyrillic, with 579 practice words to learn 49 distinct characters on. They take 7 layouts between them — Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН, Bulgarian phonetic, Kazakh ЙЦУКЕН and 4 more — so the language you pick decides the map you learn.
Developed in the ninth century and now used across Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia. It is a true alphabet with one letter per sound, so typing it is conceptually identical to typing Latin — every motion transfers. What does not transfer is the map: the standard ЙЦУКЕН layout puts a different letter under every finger you already know, and each country's variant adds or removes a handful of letters.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 49 distinct characters across 579 practice words
- Composition
- one character per keystroke, nothing stacks
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Cyrillic keyboard layouts
- Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН, Bulgarian phonetic, Kazakh ЙЦУКЕН, Macedonian Cyrillic, Mongolian Cyrillic, Serbian Cyrillic, ЙЦУКЕН
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 72% to 100% of what each language's words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in all 8 languages below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- а282
- о192
- е157
- т120
- н111
- и94
- р92
- к90
- д86
- л84
The longest practice word in this script is семейство in Bulgarian, and the widest bank to practise from is Mongolian at 88 words.
The 8 languages written in Cyrillic
- BelarusianБеларуская
- BulgarianБългарски
- KazakhҚазақша
- MacedonianМакедонски
- MongolianМонгол
- RussianРусский
- SerbianСрпски
- UkrainianУкраїнська
Other writing systems
- Arabic Written right to left, with letters that change shape depending on whether they start, sit inside, or end a word — and most of them join to the letter after.
- Devanagari An abugida, where each consonant carries an inherent vowel that other marks replace.
- Bengali Closely related to Devanagari and just as much an abugida, with a distinctive headline running along the top of most letters.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboards. Why the standard Russian layout ignores the letters on your keycaps, when a phonetic layout is defensible, and how far the eight Cyrillic layouts differ.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.