Türkçe · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Turkish
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 Turkish they produce the letters printed on them. The 6 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 Turkish
Turkish uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 6 characters beyond a-z — ü, ı, ç, ğ, ş and more.
Of the 26 characters these 53 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 12%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 26 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
Turkish (Türkçe) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 40% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 6 characters outside a-z: ü, ı, ç, ğ, ş and ö. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
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.
Most people arrive at Turkish able to type and unable to type Turkish, 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 53
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 3.8 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Turkish practice words
- ü10
- ı7
- ç4
- ğ2
- ş2
- ö1
Counted across the 53 practice words. 40% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include ü, ı, ç, ğ and 2 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 6 characters Turkish 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.
bir ve bu da ne için çok daha gibi ama ben senThe F-keyboard, and why almost nobody uses it
Turkey has a keyboard layout designed for Turkish, and it is a genuinely good one. The F-keyboard was developed in the 1950s from an analysis of Turkish letter frequency, balances the load between the hands more evenly than QWERTY manages for any language, and became a Turkish standard in 1974. Turkish speed-typing records are set on it.
Almost nobody uses it. The Q-keyboard — QWERTY with ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü added — is what is sold, what is installed, and what these lessons teach. The F-keyboard's advantage was real and arrived too late to overcome the installed base, which is the same story as Dvorak with a better-supported design.
One feature of Turkish orthography catches every programmer and many typists: Turkish has a dotless ı and a dotted i as separate letters, and capital I is the capital of ı while capital İ is the capital of i. It is the most famous case-conversion trap in software, and on a keyboard it means two distinct keys where English has one.
Questions about typing in Turkish
Do I need a Turkish keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces ü, ı, ç, ğ and ş 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.
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 Turkish 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 Turkish, 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.
Which Turkish keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 6 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 53 practice words between them use 26 of those 32, so 6 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 Turkish?
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 53 common Turkish words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Turkish hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 40% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 6 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 53 Turkish 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 Turkish: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yoruba, Zulu, Afrikaans. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Turkish: two national layouts and two letter i'sTurkey has a keyboard designed for Turkish and almost nobody uses it. What the Q-keyboard adds to QWERTY, and why the dotless i catches everyone.
- 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.