Tiếng Việt · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Vietnamese
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 Vietnamese they produce the letters printed on them. The 33 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 Vietnamese
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 33 characters beyond a-z — đ, à, ớ, ư, ó and more.
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 61 common Vietnamese words — 52 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.2 written units per word.
Vietnamese's 61-word bank draws on 52 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 12% 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.
The awkward part of Vietnamese is not the alphabet, it is the 33 characters these practice words put outside it: đ, à, ớ, ư, ó, ờ, â and ạ and more. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 84% of the practice words.
The temptation in Vietnamese 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
- 61
- Distinct characters
- 52
- Average word
- 3.2 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Vietnamese practice words
- đ7
- à6
- ớ5
- ư5
- ó3
- ờ3
- â2
- ạ2
- ê2
- ế2
- ô2
- ữ2
Counted across the 61 practice words. 84% of them need at least one.
The drills do not include đ, à, ớ, ư and 29 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 33 characters Vietnamese 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.
và của là trong có được không cho này đã một ngườiTelex and VNI: two ways to type the tone marks
Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet with more diacritics than almost any other language that does — seven additional letters and five tone marks, which combine, so a single vowel can carry two marks at once. No keyboard has keys for all of them.
The solution is an input method that builds them from ordinary letters. Telex, the more common one, uses letter keys as modifiers: typing "aa" gives â, "aw" gives ă, and "s", "f", "r", "x", "j" append the five tones. VNI uses the number row instead — "a1" for á, "a2" for à, and so on.
Both are typed on an ordinary QWERTY keyboard and both are a genuine skill of their own. Which you learn is usually decided by which your family or workplace uses; Telex is more common in Vietnam, VNI more common among the diaspora, and neither is going away.
Questions about typing in Vietnamese
Do I need a Vietnamese keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — đ, à, ớ, ư, ó and ờ and others — 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 Vietnamese keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 33 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 61 practice words between them use 52 of those 59, so 7 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 Vietnamese?
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 61 common Vietnamese words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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 Vietnamese?
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 Vietnamese?
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 Vietnamese 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.
Is Vietnamese hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 84% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 33 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 Vietnamese: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Welsh, Yoruba, Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Vietnamese: Telex, VNI and the tone marksVietnamese needs more characters beyond a-z than any other Latin alphabet here, and no keyboard has keys for them. How Telex and VNI build them instead.
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
- Typing accented letters and symbolsDead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.