Slovenščina · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Slovenian
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 Slovenian they produce the letters printed on them. The 3 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 Slovenian
Slovenian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — č, ž, š.
Slovenian sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 3 more: č, ž and š. 16% 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.
Most people arrive at Slovenian able to type and unable to type Slovenian, 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 distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 91 practice words, 24 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 13% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 72%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
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 91 common Slovenian words — 24 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.4 written units per word.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 91
- Distinct characters
- 24
- Average word
- 4.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Slovenian practice words
- č6
- ž5
- š4
Counted across the 91 practice words. 16% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include č, ž or š. 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 3 characters Slovenian 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.
in je se na da ne za so po ki pa kotThree háček letters, and the dual
Slovene uses a Latin alphabet of twenty-five letters with just three carrying diacritics: č, š and ž. It omits q, w, x and y from native words. Among the Slavic languages using Latin script, this makes it one of the least diacritically busy.
The keyboard is QWERTZ and is nearly identical to the Croatian one, minus the letters Croatian has that Slovene does not.
Slovene retains the dual number — a separate grammatical form for exactly two of something, distinct from singular and plural — which almost no other living European language does. It means more word forms to type and is a source of national affection.
Questions about typing in Slovenian
Do I need a Slovenian keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces č, ž and š 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 Slovenian keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 91 practice words between them use 24 of those 29, 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 Slovenian?
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 91 common Slovenian words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Where should I start with Slovenian?
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 Slovenian 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.
How long does learning to touch type in Slovenian take?
Longer than a week and shorter than you fear — and it depends far more on how often you practise than on how long each session runs. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones by a wide margin, because what you are building is recall and recall decays between sessions. The streak counter exists for that reason.
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.
Is Slovenian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 16% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 3 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 91 Slovenian 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 Slovenian: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Uzbek. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing accuracyWhat an accuracy percentage really means, why an error costs more than one keystroke, and how to fix accuracy without simply slowing down forever.
- 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.