Svenska · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Swedish
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 Swedish 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 Swedish
Swedish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — å, ä, ö.
If you already touch type English, most of Swedish transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 3 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — å, ä and ö — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A steady minority in this bank needs at least one.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 48 common Swedish words — 24 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.3 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.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 69% of everything these Swedish words contain; past that you are learning characters that turn up once in a paragraph, which takes as long to automate and pays back far less often.
The temptation in Swedish 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
- 48
- Distinct characters
- 24
- Average word
- 3.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Swedish practice words
- å5
- ä5
- ö1
Counted across the 48 practice words. 23% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include å, ä or ö. 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 Swedish 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.
lugna händer hittar hemraden utan att tittaThree letters at the end of the alphabet, not the middle
Swedish adds å, ä and ö, and their position matters: they come after z, at the end of the alphabet, rather than being sorted as variants of a and o. Getting this wrong is the classic mistake in software that sorts Swedish names.
The Swedish keyboard gives all three dedicated keys to the right of L and P, in the positions a US keyboard uses for semicolon, apostrophe and bracket. The same physical layout serves Finnish, which is why it is often labelled Swedish/Finnish.
Note that Swedish ä and ö are Danish and Norwegian æ and ø — same sounds, different letters — so the three Scandinavian keyboards are similar and not interchangeable.
Questions about typing in Swedish
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.
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 Swedish 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 Swedish, you will simply predict what is coming sooner, and prediction is most of what typing speed is.
Do I need a Swedish keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — å, ä and ö — 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 Swedish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 48 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 Swedish?
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 48 common Swedish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Swedish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 23% 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?
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 Swedish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, Zulu. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- 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.