We Added 3 New Languages — Here's What We Learned About Keyboards Around the World

TypingGamesKids launched on April 16th, in English only. Three days later, I had a small pile of emails that changed the way I think about keyboards.

A mom in Guadalajara wrote that her 7-year-old son loved Alphabet Zoo but kept asking why the game never showed the letter Ñ — a letter he writes every day at school. A dad in São Paulo said his daughter was confused because Home Row Hero told her to press the semicolon key, but her Brazilian teacher taught her that the right pinky goes on Ç. And a teacher in Lyon, France sent possibly the most eye-opening email: "Your home row lesson says ASDF JKL; — but our keyboards start with QSDF. The A key is where your Q key is."

I spent a full day reading about why keyboards are different in different countries, and I learned things I genuinely did not know before building this site. This post is the result: what I found, what it means for kids learning to type around the world, and the three new language versions we just shipped.

Not Every Keyboard Says QWERTY

Most kids in the United States learn to type on a QWERTY keyboard. The name comes from the first six letters on the top-left row: Q, W, E, R, T, Y. It was designed in the 1870s for the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, and it became the global default mostly because American typewriters were exported everywhere in the early 1900s.

But "global default" does not mean "universal." There are three major keyboard layouts used around the world for languages that use the Latin alphabet:

• QWERTY — Used in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, and most of Latin America and Northern Europe.
• AZERTY — Used in France, Belgium, and many French-speaking African countries. The A and Q keys are swapped, and so are the W and Z keys.
• QWERTZ — Used in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Central Europe. The Y and Z keys are swapped — because in German, the letter Z appears right after T far more often than Y does.

That means a French child sitting down at a typing lesson that says "place your left index finger on F" is already confused — because on their keyboard, the A key is not on the home row. The Q key is. When every typing lesson online assumes QWERTY, kids in AZERTY countries are essentially being taught the wrong finger positions from the very first exercise.

The Home Row Problem: Why It Matters for Kids

The home row is the single most important row on the keyboard for learning to type. It is where your fingers rest between keystrokes, and it is the foundation that every typing method is built on.

On a QWERTY keyboard, the home row keys are ASDF for the left hand and JKL; for the right. Your two index fingers sit on F and J — the keys with the small bumps you can feel without looking.

On a French AZERTY keyboard, the home row looks completely different for the left hand: QSDF. The A and Q keys are swapped, so the left pinky finger, which sits on A in English, now sits on Q. The right side changes too — instead of ending on the semicolon, the French home row ends on M: JKLM.

For Spanish and Portuguese speakers, the layout is friendlier — both countries use QWERTY keyboards, just like the U.S. The main difference is a special key next to L: the Ñ key on Spanish keyboards and the Ç key on Brazilian keyboards. So when a Spanish-speaking kid plays Home Row Hero on our site, the left-hand positioning is identical. The right pinky just lands on a different character.

That small difference matters more than you would think. When a child practices "ASDF JKL;" hundreds of times and then goes back to their own keyboard where the right pinky naturally falls on Ñ or Ç, the muscle memory mismatch can cause real confusion — especially for kids under 8 who are still building the mental map between their fingers and the screen.

What Makes Typing in Spanish, Portuguese, and French Different

Each language has its own typing quirks that go beyond the keyboard layout.

Spanish: The Ñ and Accent Marks

Spanish uses 27 letters — the same 26 as English, plus Ñ. The Ñ key sits to the right of L on the Spanish QWERTY layout, exactly where the semicolon is on U.S. keyboards. Spanish also uses accent marks frequently (á, é, í, ó, ú) and the inverted punctuation marks ¿ and ¡ that don't exist in English at all.

For a 7-year-old in Mexico City learning to type, words like "año" (year), "niño" (boy), and "mañana" (tomorrow) are among the first words they spell at school. A typing game that only uses the 26 English letters is basically ignoring one of the most common characters in their written language. That is exactly why our Spanish typing games include Ñ in the word banks and home row training.

Portuguese: The Cedilla and Tildes

Brazilian Portuguese typing is similar to Spanish in that it uses a QWERTY layout, but the special characters are different. The Ç (c-cedilla) is extremely common — it appears in words like "ação" (action), "criança" (child), and "começar" (to begin). Portuguese also uses tildes over vowels (ã, õ) much more heavily than Spanish does.

The Brazilian ABNT2 keyboard has the Ç key right on the home row, next to L. The tilde key (~) is also in a much more accessible position than on U.S. keyboards. When a Brazilian kid types the word "coração" (heart), they need three special characters: ç, ã, and the accent on ã — all produced differently than any key combination an English-speaking child would ever learn. Our Portuguese typing games use real Brazilian vocabulary so kids practice with the words and characters they actually use at school.

French: A Completely Different Layout

French is the biggest departure from English typing. France uses the AZERTY keyboard, which moves far more than just a few special characters:

• A and Q swap positions. The A key is where Q is on QWERTY, and vice versa.
• Z and W swap positions. Z moves up to the top row where W used to be.
• M moves to the home row. Instead of being on the bottom row, M sits where the semicolon is on QWERTY.
• Numbers require Shift. The number row default is accented characters and symbols: & é " ' ( - è _ ç à.

This means a French 8-year-old learning to type "bonjour" is starting from a completely different muscle memory than an American 8-year-old typing "hello." The B is in the same place, but the O, N, J — the finger paths to reach each of these letters involve different starting positions because the home row itself has shifted. Our French typing games are the only free kids' typing games we know of that teach the correct AZERTY home row from the start.

What We Built: 3 New Language Versions

After reading those emails and spending a day buried in keyboard layout documentation, research papers from the French National Education Ministry, and the Brazilian BNCC curriculum framework, we built three new language versions of TypingGamesKids: Español for Spanish-speaking families across Latin America, Português for Brazilian kids, and Français for children in France and French-speaking countries.

What changed in the games

The most important change is in Home Row Hero. In the English version, this game teaches ASDF JKL; — the standard U.S. home row. In the French version, it teaches QSDF JKLM — the AZERTY home row. In the Spanish version, the right pinky target is Ñ instead of semicolon. In the Portuguese version, it is Ç.

The word-based games — Dino Dash, Word Bubbles, Speed Racer, Sentence Safari, and Type Master — now use word banks in each language. A Brazilian child playing Dino Dash in Portuguese types "dinossauro" and "borboleta" instead of "dinosaur" and "butterfly." A French child playing Speed Racer in French types "voiture" and "chapeau" instead of "car" and "hat." And a Mexican child can practice with real Spanish vocabulary in Word Bubbles en Español.

These are not Google Translate outputs. We researched grade-appropriate vocabulary lists from each country's national curriculum standards and built word banks that match what kids at each grade level are actually reading and writing at school.

Why Most Typing Sites Only Support English

This is something I noticed while researching how other typing sites handle multiple languages: most of them don't — at least not in a way that works well for young children.

A few major platforms like Typing Club and Typing.com offer Spanish and French courses, and they do a decent job for older students. But for kids ages 5–8, the typing game options in other languages are extremely limited. Most free typing games were designed by English-speaking developers who built their key detection, scoring systems, and visual keyboard guides around a single layout.

Supporting a different keyboard layout is not just a translation job. You have to rethink every part of the game that touches the keyboard:

• The visual keyboard overlay needs different key labels and positions
• The home row training needs different target keys
• The scoring system needs to handle characters like Ñ, Ç, and accented vowels
• The word lists need to be written by someone who knows what 7-year-olds actually read in that language — not pulled from a dictionary

We built our system so that adding a new language does not require rewriting any game code. Each game reads a language-specific word bank file, and the home row configuration switches automatically based on the language. If we add German next (QWERTZ layout), the games will adapt without any changes to the game engine itself.

Quick Keyboard Comparison: What Your Child Uses

If you are a parent wondering which keyboard layout your child has, here is a fast reference:

A helpful detail: the keyboard layout is tied to the country your computer or tablet was purchased in (or the keyboard language setting in your OS), not the language your child speaks. A Mexican family living in the United States might have a U.S. QWERTY keyboard at home — which means their child would practice English home row positions even when typing in Spanish.

Things I Learned That Surprised Me

Building this feature in one day involved a lot of reading, and some of it was genuinely surprising. A few things I want to share:

French keyboards make numbers harder to type. On an AZERTY keyboard, the default top row is symbols and accented characters. To type the number 1, you have to hold Shift. This is the opposite of QWERTY, where you hold Shift to get the symbol (!) and type 1 by default. For younger kids who are still learning numbers, this is a real obstacle — and it is part of why France has been actively discussing a new keyboard standard (NF Z71-300) since 2019.

The Ñ is not just "an N with a tilde." In Spanish, Ñ is its own letter with its own position in the alphabet (between N and O). It has its own dedicated key. Treating it as a modified N — the way most English keyboard layouts handle it — is like asking an English speaker to type the letter B by pressing a modifier key plus P. It just does not make sense.

Brazil and Portugal use different keyboards. Brazilian keyboards (ABNT2 layout) and Portuguese keyboards (European layout) are not the same. The Ç key is in a different position, and the accent mark keys are arranged differently. We chose Brazilian Portuguese for our first Portuguese version because Brazil has over 20 times the population of Portugal and a much larger base of elementary-age internet users.

Typing speed research is almost entirely in English. The average typing speed benchmarks we published last week are based on English-language studies. Research on children's typing speed in Spanish, Portuguese, or French is extremely thin. This is a gap in the field, and it means we do not have reliable WPM targets for kids typing in other languages yet.

What Is Coming Next

We are already thinking about German (QWERTZ) as a possible fourth language. German is interesting because the keyboard swap is minimal — just Y and Z — but the language has some of the longest compound words in any European language. A word like "Handschuh" (glove) or "Schmetterling" (butterfly) changes the typing game experience significantly when your word bank suddenly has 12-letter words at the 2nd grade level.

We are also working on making the typing test available in each language, so kids can measure their speed in the language they actually use at school.

If your child speaks a language we have not added yet, email us. The emails that started this whole project came from three parents who took two minutes to write. Those emails turned into three new language versions in under 72 hours.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my child switch between the English and Spanish versions?

Yes. Every page on TypingGamesKids has a language switcher in the top navigation bar. Your child can play Dino Dash in English, switch to Dino Dash en Español to practice Spanish words, and switch back. Their progress in each game resets when they switch languages — each language version is a separate play session. You can also browse all available games by language: English games, Spanish games, Portuguese games, or French games.

Do kids need a special keyboard to use the Spanish or Portuguese version?

No. The games work on any keyboard. If your child uses a U.S. QWERTY keyboard, they can still play the Spanish version — the word banks will use Spanish words, but the home row guidance will match their physical keyboard. If they have a Spanish or Portuguese keyboard with the Ñ or Ç key, the home row game will reflect that.

What is the difference between QWERTY and AZERTY for kids?

QWERTY and AZERTY are two different keyboard layouts. QWERTY is used in the U.S., U.K., and most of the world. AZERTY is used in France and Belgium. The main difference for kids learning to type is that the home row — the row where fingers rest — starts with different letters. On QWERTY, the left hand starts on A-S-D-F. On AZERTY, it starts on Q-S-D-F. This means typing lessons designed for QWERTY keyboards teach the wrong finger positions to French kids.

Why don't you support German or Japanese keyboards yet?

We are starting with the three languages that our users asked for first. German (QWERTZ layout) is on our roadmap. Japanese typing is a much bigger challenge because it involves input method editors (IMEs) that convert typed Roman characters into Japanese characters — a fundamentally different system that would require significant changes to our game engine. We are researching it, but we want to do it right rather than rush it.

Does typing speed differ between languages?

Research suggests yes, but the data for children is limited. Adult typing studies have shown that keyboard layout can affect typing speed, with AZERTY typists sometimes testing 5–10% slower than QWERTY typists in their own language. However, this may have more to do with the specific positions of frequently used letters than with the layout itself. For kids, the most important factor is still consistent practice — regardless of which language or keyboard they use.

Is it better for bilingual kids to learn typing in English or their home language first?

There is no single right answer, but a practical approach is to start with whichever language the child reads and writes more at school. If they attend a Spanish-language school, start with Spanish typing. If they attend an English-language school but speak Spanish at home, English typing at school and Spanish typing practice at home can work well together. The core finger mechanics are the same on any QWERTY keyboard — the difference is just which words they are practicing.