Is Typing Slower in Languages Other Than English?

The comparison almost everyone gets wrong

> Quick answer: Yes, most people score lower in languages other than English, but usually because of how WPM is calculated rather than because they type more slowly. WPM counts five characters as one word, so languages with longer average words produce lower scores at identical finger speed. Accents, dead keys and input methods add real cost on top. Compare characters per minute instead.

Someone told me they type 95 WPM in English and 71 in German and asked what was wrong with their German.

Nothing was wrong with their German. The measurement was doing it.

I've had this conversation enough times to keep the arithmetic handy. It trips up bilingual typists constantly, and once you see the numbers it stops being mysterious. There are two separate effects tangled together here: a scoring artifact that isn't real, and a genuine mechanical cost that is. Worth separating them.

Why the scoring is unfair

WPM does not count words. It counts characters and divides.

The standard is five characters, including the space, equals one word. That convention exists so that a test isn't skewed by whether the text happens to contain lots of short words, and the words per minute definition covers where it came from.

It works fine within a language. Across languages it falls apart.

English averages roughly five characters per word including the space, which is exactly what the standard was built around. That's not a coincidence, since the convention came out of English language typing tests.

German averages meaningfully longer. Compound nouns are a real structural feature, not a joke, and words like Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung are ordinary vocabulary rather than curiosities. Finnish and Hungarian run longer still because of agglutination, where suffixes stack onto a stem.

Here's the consequence. If you type at an identical physical rate, say 400 characters per minute, you score 80 WPM in any language. But you produce fewer *actual words* in German than in English for those same characters. So your German WPM, measured properly against real words, looks lower.

Except most tests use the five character convention regardless of language, which means the number you see is usually comparable in characters and misleading as a measure of communication. Either way, the two figures aren't measuring the same thing, and comparing them tells you very little.

The fix is to use characters per minute when you want to compare across languages. It's the same physical measurement in both, and most serious testing tools report it alongside WPM.

I ran this on myself to check the size of the effect, using the same test length in English and then in a language with noticeably longer words. The WPM gap looked alarming, around 18 points. The CPM gap was under 30, which is a few percent and well inside the range my own runs vary by anyway. Almost the entire apparent difference was the divisor, not my hands.

The costs that are genuinely real

Now the part that isn't an artifact.

Accents and diacritics add keystrokes. On a French AZERTY layout the common accented characters have dedicated keys, which is efficient. On a US layout typing é means a dead key sequence or a modifier combination, which is two or three actions instead of one. If you're writing French on an American keyboard, you are genuinely doing more work per character, and the AZERTY layout page shows how differently the same alphabet gets arranged to accommodate that.

Dead keys deserve their own mention because they break rhythm rather than just adding time. A dead key produces nothing on its own and waits for the next keystroke to combine. That pause is small but it interrupts the flow state that fast typing depends on, and it's why people who type accented languages regularly tend to prefer a native layout even though the letter positions differ.

Capitalisation is a quiet one. German capitalises every noun. That's a shift press on a large fraction of words rather than just at sentence starts, and shift presses cost real time and disproportionately involve the pinky.

Non Latin scripts are a different problem entirely. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and others typically go through an input method that converts phonetic input into the target script, often with a candidate selection step. You're typing romanised syllables and then choosing among options, which means keystrokes per output character bear no simple relationship to speed. WPM as a concept barely applies, and skilled typists in these languages are measured on characters per minute against completely different baselines.

So what should you actually compare?

A few honest options, depending on what you want to know.

Characters per minute is the fairest single number across languages. It measures physical output and ignores how the language happens to package words. If a test gives you CPM, use it.

Compare against yourself, in the same language, over time. This is the only comparison that reliably means anything. Your German speed this month against your German speed last month tells you if you're improving. Your German against your English tells you mostly about German.

Compare against native speakers of that language, not against global English averages. Typing speed norms differ by language for all the reasons above, and holding yourself to an English benchmark while typing Finnish is setting up an unfair test.

One more factor that gets ignored: vocabulary familiarity. You type faster in your dominant language partly because you anticipate words. Reading ahead is a large part of fast typing, and you read ahead better in a language you think in. A bilingual typist with genuinely equal fluency shows a much smaller gap than someone typing their second language, and that gap closes with reading practice rather than typing practice.

If you're benchmarking yourself, run the same length test in both languages on the same day and note the CPM rather than the WPM. Doing that on a consistent practice session removes most of the noise, and the percentile breakdown is a useful reference for where English speeds sit if that's your baseline.

What transfers between languages

The encouraging part is that most of the skill does carry.

If both languages share a script and a layout, essentially all of your technique transfers. Home row position, finger assignments, rhythm, the habit of not looking. You're not relearning to type, you're adapting to different letter frequencies and word shapes.

Letter frequency is the interesting adaptation. English leans heavily on E, T, A, O and N. German uses far more umlauts and has different common digraphs. Spanish is vowel dense. Your hands optimise for the patterns they see most, which is why the second language feels slightly less fluid even at equal skill. That gap narrows with volume.

Layout changes are the harder case. Moving between QWERTY and AZERTY or QWERTZ means real relearning, because A, Q, W, Z and M sit in different places. It's not a full retrain, but it's weeks rather than days, and the daily switching problem is the same one that affects people moving between operating systems.

My practical advice for anyone typing regularly in two languages on one machine: pick one layout and stay on it, even if it's technically suboptimal for one of the languages. Consistent muscle memory on a compromise layout beats split muscle memory on two ideal ones. That's the same conclusion I reached about switching between different keyboards, and it holds here for the same reason.