GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Беларуская
Belarusian typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Belarusian. 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 Belarusian with games
Belarusian is written in the Cyrillic script. The Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН layout maps 31 characters across the keys you already have, so every motion transfers and every letter moves.
Worth knowing before you start: these 70 words use 30 distinct characters, and the effort is not spread evenly across them. Ten of them do roughly 61% of the work, so the first week of practice buys far more than the tenth will. That is the normal shape of it, not a sign of a plateau.
Belarusian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, so a Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard puts a different letter under every finger you already know. 31 keys are remapped, and that is the entire difficulty: the motions are the ones you have, aimed at different letters.
Games here are practice with a failure condition, not a different activity: same words as the speed test, same script, same layout. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 70 common Belarusian words — 30 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.3 written units per word. Only the pacing changes, and it changes upward — four clean hits raise the level, and nothing lowers it again.
Expect a strange few days in Belarusian where you are at once a competent typist and a beginner. Everything your hands know still works; everything your memory knows points at the wrong letters. It resolves in days rather than months, provided the practice is frequent rather than long.
- Writing system
- Cyrillic
- Keyboard layout
- Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН
- Direction
- left to right
- Mapped characters
- 31
- Practice words
- 70
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters you will press most in these Belarusian words
- а52
- о19
- р17
- к16
- і15
- д14
- л14
- н13
- т13
- м11
- ц11
- в10
Counted across the 70 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
спакойныя рукі знаходзяць асноўны рад без позіркуЎ, and a second orthography
Belarusian Cyrillic includes ў — a u with a breve, the short u — which no other Cyrillic alphabet uses and which is common enough in Belarusian that the city of Polatsk erected a monument to it. It is the letter that marks text as Belarusian at a glance.
Belarusian also has i where Russian has и, lacks щ and ъ, and uses an apostrophe as a letter-level character.
There are two orthographies in use. The official one dates from a 1933 reform; Taraškievica, the pre-reform spelling, remained in use in the diaspora and was revived domestically, and it represents assimilation in spelling where the official version does not. The letters are the same; the spellings differ, sometimes visibly.
Questions about typing in Belarusian
Do I need a Belarusian keyboard?
No. Switching your operating system to the Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН layout remaps the keyboard you already own; nothing physical changes. Stickers and printed keycaps exist, and they are worth skipping — they reward glancing down, which is the habit this whole exercise is trying to remove.
Which Belarusian keyboard layout do these games use?
Belarusian ЙЦУКЕН, with 31 characters mapped across the standard key positions. The 70 practice words between them use 30 of those 31, so the drills reach very nearly all of the layout rather than a comfortable corner. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the physical key and the character it produces together, so you are never reading a layout diagram in one window while typing in another.
What will I actually be typing in Belarusian?
70 of the most common words in Belarusian, drawn at random. They use 30 distinct characters between them and average 4.3 written units each, with the longest running to about 7. 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 Belarusian hard to type?
Harder to start, not harder to reach. Every motion you already have transfers; what does not is the map, and 31 key positions have to be relearned. With a fairly compact inventory of 30 characters across the practice bank, most people are past the worst of it inside two weeks of short daily sessions.
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.
Which game should I start with?
Whichever appeals — they pressure different things. Falling words reward finishing what you started; the orbit rewards picking a target and committing; the shrinking timer rewards not hesitating. If you are trying to fix hesitation specifically, the third one is the unpleasant and effective choice.
Do games help, or are they just a break?
Both, honestly. They will not teach you a key you have never drilled, and they are very good at exposing which keys you only think you know — under time pressure the shaky ones fail first. Treat them as a diagnostic and the lessons as the fix.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 70 Belarusian practice words, the speed test and all three games are the whole product, available immediately. Signing in is worth it only if you practise on more than one device.
Also in Belarusian: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Cyrillic: Bulgarian, Kazakh, Macedonian, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboardsWhy the standard Russian layout ignores the letters on your keycaps, when a phonetic layout is defensible, and how far the eight Cyrillic layouts differ.
- The bottom rowZ X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.
- What counts as a good typing speedGood depends on what you type and how accurately. A guide to the bands, why accuracy beats speed, and what employers actually ask for.