GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Euskara
Basque typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Basque. 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 Basque with games
Basque is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 87 common Basque words — 21 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.7 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.
Because none of these practice words leaves a-z, the skill you build here is portable. Learn the 87-word bank cleanly and the same hand positions serve every other Latin-alphabet language on this site — the keys do not move, only the words on top of them do.
The plateau in Basque is almost always the same thing: looking down. It feels faster and it caps you, because a glance is a pause plus a re-find. Nothing here can stop you doing it — but a drill you did not type cleanly will not be counted, which helps.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 80% of everything these Basque 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
- 87
- Distinct characters
- 21
- Average word
- 4.7 units
Characters you will press most in these Basque words
- a65
- i53
- r39
- e37
- n31
- o24
- t23
- u21
- z18
- k15
- l15
- b12
Counted across the 87 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
eta da ez bat hau hori bere gure zure oso asko ondoA language with no relatives, typed on a Spanish keyboard
Basque is a language isolate — unrelated to any other language on earth, and spoken in its region before Indo-European arrived. Its written form uses the Latin alphabet and, since the standardisation of Euskara Batua in 1968, needs almost nothing beyond it.
The alphabet includes ñ and uses the digraphs dd, ll, rr, ts, tt, tx and tz. c, q, v, w and y appear only in loanwords and foreign names. Most Basque typists use a Spanish keyboard.
The letter x is worth a note: in Basque it spells a sound like English sh, which is why Basque place names look startling to Spanish readers and why the letter appears far more often than its position in the alphabet would suggest.
Questions about typing in Basque
Do I need a Basque keyboard?
No. This is one of the few languages where the answer is genuinely "nothing to set up": the 21 distinct characters in the practice bank are all letters already printed on your keys.
Which Basque keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 87 practice words between them use 21 of those 26, so 5 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 Basque words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Basque 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 Basque?
87 of the most common words in Basque, drawn at random. They use 21 distinct characters between them and average 4.7 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 Basque hard to type?
No — Basque is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 21 characters across the practice bank, and every key already under your fingers. Whatever difficulty you meet is the difficulty of touch typing itself, not of this language.
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 Basque: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Catalan, Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch. 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.
- 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.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.