Yorùbá · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Yoruba
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 Yoruba they produce exactly the letters printed on them — nothing is remapped and nothing is hidden behind a modifier.
Learning to type in Yoruba
Yoruba is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
Because none of these practice words leaves a-z, the skill you build here is portable. Learn the 79-word bank cleanly and the same hand positions serve every other Latin-alphabet language on this site — the keys do not move, only the words on top of them do.
Speed in Yoruba comes from prediction more than from finger speed: a familiar word is one motion, an unfamiliar one is a letter at a time. Drilling common words trains the shapes the language repeats, and "o" is the character you will press most.
Of the 20 characters these 79 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 16%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 20 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 79 common Yoruba words — 20 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 79
- Distinct characters
- 20
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters you will press most in these Yoruba words
- o45
- a35
- i31
- e29
- r23
- n21
- b15
- u15
- k11
- l8
- s8
- g7
Counted across the 79 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
ati ni si ti fun pe ko wa pupo dara nla kekereUnderdots and tone marks, stacked
Yoruba is a tonal language with three tones, marked with acute and grave accents over vowels, or left unmarked for the mid tone. Separately, three letters carry a dot below — ẹ, ọ and ṣ — which distinguishes them from e, o and s as different sounds.
The two systems combine, so a single letter can carry a dot underneath and an accent above at the same time. That is a genuine difficulty for typing: the combination has to be built from a base letter and two combining marks, and many keyboards and fonts handle it poorly.
A great deal of Yoruba online is written without either, which is readable in context and ambiguous out of it — the same letters with different tones are frequently different words.
That includes the practice words on this page, and it is worth saying so rather than leaving you to notice. They are written in the plain form, which is the common informal register and is not correct orthography. Writing them properly needs a Yoruba speaker to check every tone, and guessing at tones in a tool whose purpose is that people practise typing them would be worse than admitting the gap.
Questions about typing in Yoruba
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 Yoruba 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 Yoruba, 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.
Do I need a Yoruba keyboard?
No — and no layout change either. Yoruba spells its 79 most common words entirely from a-z, so whatever keyboard you are reading this on is already a Yoruba keyboard.
Which Yoruba keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 79 practice words between them use 20 of those 26, 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 Yoruba?
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 79 common Yoruba words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Yoruba hard to type?
No — Yoruba is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 20 characters across the practice bank, and every key already under your fingers. Whatever difficulty you meet is the difficulty of touch typing itself, not of this language.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 79 Yoruba 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 Yoruba: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.
- The bottom rowZ X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.