isiZulu · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Zulu
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 Zulu they produce exactly the letters printed on them — nothing is remapped and nothing is hidden behind a modifier.
Learning to type in Zulu
Zulu is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
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.
Zulu (isiZulu) makes no demands of your hardware at all. No layout to install, no dead keys, no modifier chords — 81 common words spelled entirely from the letter keys. If you have never touch typed before, this is the sensible place to start, and the sensible thing to start with is accuracy.
The plateau in Zulu is almost always the same thing: looking down. It feels faster and it caps you, because a glance is a pause plus a re-find. Nothing here can stop you doing it — but a drill you did not type cleanly will not be counted, which helps.
Worth knowing before you start: these 81 words use 22 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 80% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 81
- Distinct characters
- 22
- Average word
- 6.2 units
Characters you will press most in these Zulu words
- a74
- u72
- i53
- n50
- k41
- l27
- e25
- h24
- b16
- m16
- o16
- s14
Counted across the 81 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
futhi ku na nge uku ngo kakhulu kahle khulu ncane sha isikhathiThree letters that are clicks
Zulu is written with the plain Latin alphabet and no diacritics at all, which makes it one of the easier languages here to type and conceals something genuinely unusual about it.
Three ordinary-looking letters represent click consonants: c is a dental click, made as in a sound of mild disapproval; q is a palatal click, like a bottle being uncorked; x is a lateral click, as used to urge on a horse. They are full consonants, they appear in everyday words, and they are why Zulu is easy to type and hard to read aloud.
Zulu also uses the digraphs and trigraphs hl, dl, ng, nk, ntsh and others extensively, and it is agglutinative, so words are long. The keyboard, though, is the one you already have.
Questions about typing in Zulu
Do I need a Zulu keyboard?
No. This is one of the few languages where the answer is genuinely "nothing to set up": the 22 distinct characters in the practice bank are all letters already printed on your keys.
Do I need to know Zulu 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 Zulu, 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.
How often should I practise Zulu?
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.
Which Zulu keyboard layout do these lessons use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 81 practice words between them use 22 of those 26, so 4 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 Zulu?
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 81 common Zulu words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
Is Zulu hard to type?
No — Zulu is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 22 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?
No account, no payment, no trial. Progress is stored in this browser, which is enough until you want it on a second device or on a leaderboard — that is the only thing an account buys, and it is optional.
Also in Zulu: the speed test and typing games.
Other languages written in Latin: Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Cebuano. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- The number rowNumbers and symbols sit two rows above home, and almost nobody drills them. Which finger takes which digit, and when to use the keypad instead.
- How to type fasterSix changes that raise typing speed, in the order worth making them. Most people's fastest gain is not typing faster — it is stopping mistakes.
- What counts as a good typing speedGood depends on what you type and how accurately. A guide to the bands, why accuracy beats speed, and what employers actually ask for.