QWERTZ typing test

Pick the right setup first

This page always emulates QWERTZ (Germany). For tests elsewhere on the site, the layout emulation setting covers three common situations:

Emulation translates the physical position of each key into its QWERTZ character inside the typing area only. Your operating system doesn't change, and because emulation reads positions rather than the letters your system produces, it gives the same result if your system already types QWERTZ. Leave it off in settings if you use a screen reader that follows the system layout.

If you don't want to learn the layout at all and just need to type German on a QWERTY keyboard, skip emulation and use lazy mode instead (more on that below), or go to the German typing test.

What QWERTZ changes

The letter block differs from QWERTY in one obvious place: Y and Z swap. Z is far more common than Y in German, and on typewriters the swap also put T and Z, a frequent German pair, on separate hands, which reduced jams. The other changes are additions. The German layout gives ä, ö and ü their own keys on the right-hand side, ß has its own key, and characters like @ and € sit on a third level reached with AltGr.

Punctuation moves a lot more than letters. Semicolon and colon are typed with Shift, and several brackets and symbols that a US keyboard has unshifted need Shift or AltGr on QWERTZ. That matters if you add the punctuation toggle, and much more if you program; it matters very little for plain German words.

The layout is standardised in Germany as DIN 2137. Versions of the same basic arrangement are used across German-speaking Europe and much of Central Europe, where Czech, Hungarian and other national layouts build on QWERTZ with their own letters. This test emulates only the German and Swiss variants.

Germany or Switzerland

Swiss keyboards serve German, French and Italian speakers, so the same physical keys carry both umlauts and French accents. The keycaps are engraved for both, and the system setting decides which you get unshifted: Swiss German puts ä, ö and ü on the base level, Swiss French puts é, à and è there. Swiss German doesn't use ß at all, and the Swiss German layout on Windows has no key for it.

If your keyboard came from Switzerland, choose QWERTZ (Switzerland) in the layout settings; this page itself emulates the German layout. When the German test asks for ß on a Swiss setup, lazy mode lets you type ss instead.

What umlauts and ß mean for your score

We counted the 1,000-word German list this test uses. 120 of the 1,000 words contain ä, ö, ü or ß, and together those letters make up 2.19% of everything you type. They're spread evenly: ü 0.65%, ä 0.63%, ö 0.58% and ß 0.33% of all letters. No single umlaut dominates, so practising just one of them won't close the gap.

The list is built from film and TV subtitles and lower-cased, so the commonest words are short spoken ones ("ich", "sie", "das", "ist") and the longest include "funktioniert", "entschuldige" and "verschwinden". Nouns appear in lower case in the word test. For capitalised nouns and full sentences, the quote typing test has passages from Goethe and Kafka.

Lazy mode for German

Lazy mode, in settings, swaps ü for u, ä for a, ö for o and ß for ss in the text. Nothing else is substituted. It exists for people on keyboards without umlaut keys, and results typed with it carry a lazy mode label so they're never confused with full German typing.

If you're learning QWERTZ, keep lazy mode off. The umlaut keys are the part of the layout you most need to practise.

Habits that trip up switchers

The Y and Z swap catches almost everyone who moves between layouts. Out of QWERTY habit, your left little finger reaches for Z at the bottom left and types Y, while Z now sits up on the top row under your right index finger. Watch the most-missed keys list for both letters in the first week.

The second trap is the right little finger. On QWERTY it owns the semicolon and apostrophe; on QWERTZ the same keys type ö and ä, and ü sits above them. With QWERTZ chosen in the layout settings, spend a few sessions on short 25-word tests focusing only on accuracy, then let practice build targeted drills from the keys you miss.