GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Afrikaans
Afrikaans typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Afrikaans. Every 4 clean hits raises the level, and it never drops back. Scores are kept in this browser; signed in, a new personal best also goes to the leaderboard.
GAME 02
Orbit
Hold the ring
Characters circle the core. Strike each one before its arc runs out.
GAME 03
Signal
Beat the pulse
One word, one shrinking window. Keep the chain alive as the pulse quickens.
Practising Afrikaans with games
Afrikaans uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — ê, ô, ë.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 102 common Afrikaans words — 25 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.1 written units per word. All three games pull from it, so the vocabulary you meet while playing is the vocabulary the speed test measures you on. Difficulty rises with every four clean hits and never falls back — a round ends when you stop keeping up, rather than when a timer decides.
If you already touch type English, most of Afrikaans transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 3 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ê, ô and ë — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A handful of words in this bank needs at least one.
Speed in Afrikaans comes from prediction more than from finger speed: a familiar word is one motion, an unfamiliar one is a letter at a time. That is why drilling common words works — you are not training keys so much as the shapes the language keeps repeating.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 73% of everything these Afrikaans words contain; past that you are learning characters that turn up once in a paragraph, which takes as long to automate and pays back far less often.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 102
- Distinct characters
- 25
- Average word
- 4.1 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Afrikaans practice words
- ê3
- ô2
- ë1
Counted across the 102 practice words. 6% of them need at least one.
kalm hande vind die tuisry sonder om te kykDutch spelling, simplified and then some
Afrikaans descends from seventeenth-century Dutch and has a considerably simpler spelling system, having dropped most of Dutch's inflection and regularised much of its orthography. A Dutch reader can read Afrikaans; the reverse is also largely true.
It uses the circumflex on ê, î, ô and û, the diaeresis on ë and ï, and the acute for emphasis. The most distinctive orthographic feature is the apostrophe in the indefinite article 'n, which is written lowercase even at the start of a sentence — so a sentence can begin 'n Man, with the capital falling on the second word.
A standard US or UK keyboard with a dead key covers Afrikaans without difficulty, which is what most Afrikaans typists use.
Questions about typing in Afrikaans
Do I need an Afrikaans keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 3 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 6% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Afrikaans keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 102 practice words between them use 25 of those 29, so 4 characters never come up in the practice text — these are the commonest words rather than an even sweep of the layout. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
Do the games use real Afrikaans words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Afrikaans words the speed test samples. Nothing is generated or transliterated for the sake of the game, so a score here means the same thing as a score there.
Do I need to be fast to play?
No. All three start slow and speed up only as you succeed: the level rises every four clean hits and never drops back, so a game meets you where you are and ends when you stop keeping up. What a round tells you is where that point is today, which is a more useful thing to know than a score.
Are game scores saved?
On this device, always. On the leaderboard, only if you have signed in and chosen a name — and a leaderboard name is never your email address.
What will I actually be typing in Afrikaans?
102 of the most common words in Afrikaans, drawn at random. They use 25 distinct characters between them and average 4.1 written units each, with the longest running to about 10. Short, frequent words are used on purpose: they are the ones your hands will meet most often outside a lesson, so the practice transfers.
Is Afrikaans hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 6% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 3 such characters appear in total, and the rest is a keyboard you already know. The difficulty is concentrated in a handful of positions rather than spread across the layout.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
No account, no payment, no trial. Progress is stored in this browser, which is enough until you want it on a second device or on a leaderboard — that is the only thing an account buys, and it is optional.
Also in Afrikaans: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Cebuano, Croatian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.