Is there a typing tutor for Modern Hebrew?

Question

Is there a typing tutor program for Modern Hebrew on the PC that is friendly for Hebrew learners?

I would like to learn to type on the Standard Israeli Hebrew keyboard layout, the one that starts with ק, then ר , then א (roughly, Q, R, A). My goals are to learn to type as well as build muscle memory to help me build literacy in Hebrew.

I have been typing Roman letters on a QWERTY keyboard for a quarter of a century and have good muscle memory in that layout, but would rather avoid the "easy route" (learning a non-standard Hebrew layout based on QWERTY).

Answer 1

The following open source typing tutors may be worth a try:

• KTouch - Touch Typing Tutor is part of the KDE project. It is also available on SourceForge, though that repository seems to be outdated. Since the SourceForge page has a picture of a Hebrew keyboard, I hope that Hebrew is supported.
• Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor is available for a variety of operating systems (Linux-based and Unix-like operating systems, including Mac OS, but not MS Windows) and appears to support Hebrew keyboard layouts.
• TypeFaster Typing Tutor claims to support "French, German, Portuguese, US-Dvorak, US-English, Hebrew, Numeric-keypad and more" and even says it is accessible for blind users. The project claims the program works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Unfortunately, the last update to the files dates from 2005.
• GNU Typing Trainer claims to be a multi-platform (i.e. Windows and Linux) but never left the beta stage and has not been updated since 2007. (It is not clear whether Hebrew is supported.)

Answer 2

An excellent free online site that teaches Hebrew typing is https://sense-lang.org/typing/hebrew.php. It presents the letters in a sensible order, starting with ח and כ.

If you don't know Hebrew well enough to navigate the site, go directly to https://sense-lang.org/typing/tutor/HE_lessons.php?lesson=1 and click on the red button. To proceed to lesson two, replace the 1 in the URL bar with a 2, and so on for all the lessons.

Once you have mastered the letters and want to improve your speed, go to https://monkeytype.com/ and change the language to Hebrew. It's really easy to do that. Just click on where it says "English" in the center of the screen right above the typing words, and change it to "Hebrew".

https://play.typeracer.com/?universe=lang_he is also good for practicing speed, but it has an old looking interface.

Another site that you could try is https://typing.dlvhdr.me/ It presents the letters in a sensible order, just like sense-lange.org, but it seems a little buggy to me. Sometimes it just doesn't recognize your keystrokes, and you have to refresh the page a couple times to wake it up.

Answer 3

Typeracer works for Hebrew: https://play.typeracer.com/?universe=lang_he

And it is web based, so should work on all OSes.

This touch type tutor is commercial, and costs $$: https://www.jewishsoftware.com/download-touch-typing-now-hebrew-english

Answer 4

I just created a free to use site for learning to type in Hebrew:

http://hebrewtypingtutorial.com/

No registration required. The tutorial is web-based (nothing to install or download). You don't even have to have a Hebrew keyboard installed on your computer.

Answer 5

The international ISO character standards determine what characters will be output from a keyboard. For Western (U.S., Canada, Asia, and the Pacific) the standard used with virtually all computers is the "ISO-Latin 8" standard. Font makers associate every character in a character set with an ISO-standard numeric value. For example, the ISO-Latin 8 will output the German character "Ü" by pressing and holding the ALT key down while typing the numbers "0220". It does that because the "Ü" character has that keyboard number, which is included in the ISO-Latin 8 character set. For Hebrew there is ISO standard, ISO-8859-8, for Hebrew, that is, the standard equates the output character to a numeric value that outputs a character.

That being said (and I don't know if you have done this already) if your computer's operating system is Microsoft's "Windows" you can add additional languages and keyboards (go to "Control Panel" -> "Clock, Language, and Region" (change keyboards and other input methods) -> "Region and Language".

In the "Add Language" drop down selection box you can then add one or two types of Hebrew languages, and associated keyboards. By using this feature of Windows I myself have added both Russian and German character sets, and their associated keyboards.

In summary, if you are using Windows you have the ability to add either one (or both) of the Hebrew languages and keyboard layouts for your keyboard output. "Stick on" bi-lingual stickers can be put on the QWERTY keys that correspond to your "virtual" Hebrew keyboard. As I have found with my Russian keyboard, one needs to use the old "ASDF-GH-JKL;" typing practice method to associate the position of the old keys with the characters of the newly added language. I have found that daily typing practice soon becomes less and less arduous and more and more rewarding.

Answer 6

I have always liked the American expression "Put your money where your mouth is." or its abbreviated version, "Put up, or shut up." In my first answer above I gave this question's author a method of installing a Hebrew keyboard on a Windows computer. And so it has come to "put my money where my mouth is" and demonstrate the result of doing my method.

I have no knowledge of the Hebrew language, but here for your inspection are the key outputs for the virtual Hebrew language keyboard that I installed and is now alternately keyboard-selected between English and Hebrew.

English QWERTY (international standard*) keyboard:

q w e r t y u I o p [ ] a s d f g h j k l ; ' \ \ z x c v b n m , . /

Hebrew (Israel) keyboard: / ' ק ר א ט ו ן ם פ ] [ ש ד ג כ ע י ח ל ך ף , \ \ ז ס ב ה נ מ צ ת ץ .

SE has ignored the block quote marks I put in my input draft, so please believe me when I tell you that despite SE's ignorance (or mine!) the Hebrew keyboard does echo CRLF new line, as it did in my draft where there's a CRLF at the end of top, middle, and bottom line of each keyboard's alpha keys.

I don't know the Hebrew language, so I would have to practice using my virtual Hebrew keyboard the same way as I learned how to use my virtual Russian language keyboard: by type-copying the Hebrew text you can find in printed books, magazines, and newspapers in hardcopy, or the same on the web.

בוקר טוב! איך אתה מרגיש היום? האם אתם מוכנים להתחיל לנסות את מקלדת QWERTY העברית החדשה שלכם? [not formatted]

*As I noted in my first answer (above) I found no listing for a "Hebrew keyboard" offering in the three Amazon's I looked through. All of the many, many, listings in those three Amazon's were for QWERTY keyboards. So if what you are looking for, among other things, is how to type on a pre-computer age Hebrew language keyboard, well, good luck, eh?