Learn to type Amharicልምምድ

Speed is the standard convention: correct keystrokes divided by five, divided by minutes elapsed. Keystrokes, not letters — so the number is comparable with any other typing trainer, and it is not a count of Amharic words. A word of Amharic costs more keys than it has letters, because the vowel that shapes each syllable is a key of its own.

Accuracy is correct keystrokes over every keystroke you made. A wrong key does not advance the caret: the cell turns red and holds until the right key arrives. That is deliberate. A drill that lets an error through teaches you to type past your mistakes, and this one is trying to teach your fingers where the letters are.

Words counts up when you type the space after a word — the space is a keystroke like any other and the drill asks for it. The same moment adds that word’s characters to the fidel total on the results card, which is the count of Ethiopic characters you actually committed.

Escape restarts at any time. Changing the mode or the test length restarts too: a score carried across a change of rules is not a score.

The keyboard under the drill is coloured by finger, mirrored so that the same finger on either hand takes the same colour. The deeper shade is the home row — the eight keys your fingers rest on — and the two ridges on f and j are the ones your index fingers find without looking. The key the drill is waiting for is filled in ochre.

There is no number row, because there is nothing on it to practise: the drill covers the unshifted letters, which is the layer Amharic is mostly typed on. The shifted letters and the bracket keys — the ones that reach the sounds Amharic spells more than one way — are on the key reference.

Each line is 8 words drawn from this bank at random, and a new line arrives when you finish the one in front of you. Nothing here is written by hand except the words themselves: every keystroke is read out of tables/phonetic-am-v3.tbl and then typed back through the table to check it still produces the word. A bank word that stopped producing its word would fail the build rather than quietly drill the wrong keys.

All of them are lowercase a–z by construction, which is what keeps the drill on the unshifted layer. Words needing T, N or the labialised gWa are excluded automatically rather than by hand — they belong to an advanced bank, once this one has shipped. The list is a draft and has not yet been reviewed by an Amharic speaker.

The fidel above each word is not a picture of what Ezra would do. It is geez-core, the input method’s own engine, compiled to WebAssembly — 72KB, fetched once — so the syllable you watch settle is the one the keyboard would commit. It is the same module the transliteration tool runs.

The drill itself needs none of it. The words, the clock and the score are string comparison, so the page keeps working while the module is still arriving and if it never arrives at all — the fidel simply stays in ghost until it lands.

Nothing you type leaves your device, and nothing is stored: there is no request after the module lands, and no score is kept between visits.

This is the one page on this site that needs JavaScript, and only for the drill. The finger map, the word bank and everything you are reading are ordinary markup. The full syllabary, including the letters this bank does not reach, is on the fidel chart.