Arabic typing practice
This session
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Words you've stumbled on
None yet — keep going. We'll surface words you miss more often.
None yet — keep going. We'll surface words you miss more often.
Difficulty here is about typing, not about how advanced the Arabic is. A four-letter word is easier to type than a nine-letter one even when you know both, so the levels follow length: short single words, then longer ones, then phrases with spaces in them.
Short enough that you can hold the whole word in your head while you hunt for the keys.
Long enough that you stop reading letter by letter and start typing in chunks.
Real phrases with spaces in them, which is where rhythm starts to matter.
You can dip into any set you like, but this is the run we would put someone through. The alphabet comes first because there is nothing to translate and your whole attention can sit on the keys. Travel comes last because its entries are the longest on the site.
Eight words takes a couple of minutes. Two of those a day will move you faster than one long sitting on a Sunday, because what you are building is a motor habit and habits want repetition more than they want volume.
Wrong keys learned quickly are still wrong keys. Go slow enough that you rarely miss, and the speed arrives on its own. Words you fumble get flagged during the session so you can see the pattern in what trips you.
Want a number instead of a feeling? The Arabic typing test gives you words per minute and accuracy over a fixed minute. And if you have no Arabic layout installed at all, the online Arabic keyboard will type into any text box in the meantime.
Never typed a word of Arabic? This is the on-ramp. A drill is a few minutes, and the order matters: each one leans on the last.
Start with the alphabet set. It's names spelled out letter by letter, so there's nothing to translate and nowhere to get lost. Do one session and look at your hands as much as you like.
Rest your fingers on the middle row and you're already sitting on most of the letters Arabic leans on. Type اِسْم (name), بِنْت (girl), تَمام (OK) and كَلْب (dog) until you stop looking down. None of them needs a single reach.
أ is Shift and H, and a bare ا counts as wrong where the word wants the hamza. Drill it on أَخ (brother), أُخْت (sister) and أَنا (I) until reaching for Shift stops feeling like an interruption.
Take the beginner level: hundreds of single words, none longer than four letters. When a session stops feeling like a puzzle you've outgrown it, and intermediate is next door.
Typing Arabic is less strange than it looks from the outside. Most of what slows a beginner down comes from four places, and three of them stop mattering quite quickly.
Rest your fingers on the Arabic 101 layout and you're sitting on ش س ي ب ل ا ت ن م ك ط. Seven of the letters Arabic uses most are already under your hands, so the first stretch of learning pays off out of all proportion. Get the home row solid and a large share of any word you meet is typed without moving.
This is the fear that puts people off starting, and it turns out to be nothing. ب can appear as بـ, ـبـ or ـبdepending on what sits next to it, but you press the same key every time and the font sorts the joining out. There's no shape key.
Text grows leftward and the caret travels with it, which reads as wrong for about a day. Backspace still deletes what you typed last, so the reflex you already have is the right one. Numbers are the genuinely confusing part: they stay left to right inside a right-to-left line, so a phone number looks like it has been dropped in from another sentence.
The one part worth learning deliberately. أ is Shift and H, إ is Shift and Y, آ is Shift and N, and the seated forms ئ ء ؤ live on Z, X and C. Sessions here mark a bare ا wrong where the word wants أ, on purpose, because every reader of your Arabic will notice.
The whole layout, key by key, is on the online Arabic keyboard, which also types into any text box if you need Arabic today and have nothing installed. When you're ready to make it permanent, the setup guides take about two minutes: Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android.
Every drill pulls from the same set of about a thousand Arabic words: greetings, food, numbers, family, the verbs you need first. Nothing is generated and nothing is nonsense, so the reps buy you two things at once. Ten minutes on the food set leaves you faster at the keyboard and holding a handful of words you can actually use in a shop.
Each word has audio, recorded at a normal speaking pace rather than dictation speed, and its own page with the letter breakdown and the keys it needs. Browse the lot in the vocabulary index, or let the session feed them to you and look up whatever sticks.
Yes, and most people here do. Your normal keyboard is remapped through the standard Arabic 101 layout while you type: H sends ا, F sends ب, V sends ر. The onscreen keyboard shows you which key you're meant to be reaching for, and it fades out of your attention within a session or two. Once the layout starts to feel automatic, add the real one to your machine so your fingers work off position rather than off a picture.
No. The words are shown fully diacritized because that's how you learn to read them, but you only ever type the base letters. Fatha, kasra and the rest fill themselves in as you go. That matches life outside this site, where almost nothing is written with the marks on. Hamza is the exception, and it's strict: ا, أ, إ and آ are four different keys and only the right one advances you.
Lesson 01, the alphabet set. There's nothing to translate in it, so your whole attention can sit on finding keys, and you get through the whole layout in a few sittings. After that the beginner level is the safest place to be: every word in it is four letters or shorter, which is short enough to hold in your head while you're hunting.
The hunting phase is short. Ten minutes a day for a fortnight is usually enough to stop looking at the keyboard for the common letters, because seven of the ones you use most (ا ل ي ب ن ت م) sit on the home row. Speed is the slower half. Expect a few months before your Arabic pace comes anywhere near your English pace, and expect that gap to be normal rather than a sign you're doing it wrong.
Little and often wins, by a wide margin. A session here is eight words and takes about two minutes, so two of those before you close your laptop will do more for you than an hour on a Sunday. What you're building is a motor habit, and motor habits respond to frequency.
Practice is untimed and repeats what you get wrong. The typing test is a fixed minute with a WPM and an accuracy score at the end of it, which is useful for tracking but not for learning. Practise here, then take the test every week or two to see whether the number has moved.
All of it. No account, no trial, nothing to install. Your session runs in the browser and nothing about it leaves your machine.
Still stuck on the layout itself? The keyboard page covers it key by key, and the Arabic typing test will tell you where your speed sits once the hunting stops.