GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Català
Catalan typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Catalan. 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 Catalan with games
Catalan uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 5 characters beyond a-z — é, í, è, ó, ò.
The awkward part of Catalan is not the alphabet, it is the 5 characters these practice words put outside it: é, í, è, ó and ò. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 12% of the practice words.
Each game escalates on success rather than on a schedule. Four clean hits and the level rises, permanently for that round, so the difficulty finds you instead of being chosen — a beginner and a fast typist play the same game at genuinely different speeds. The words come from the same bank the speed test samples: 100 common Catalan words.
Speed in Catalan 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.
Catalan's 100-word bank draws on 28 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 14% of all letters typed, the rarest a fraction of one. The lessons follow that gradient deliberately, which is why the home row comes first and the awkward reaches come last.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 100
- Distinct characters
- 28
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Catalan practice words
- é4
- í4
- è2
- ó1
- ò1
Counted across the 100 practice words. 12% of them need at least one.
el la de que i a en un per amb no elsThe middle dot in l·l
Catalan uses a punctuation mark almost nothing else does: the interpunct in l·l, a raised dot between two l's, which distinguishes a geminate l from the digraph ll that spells a different sound entirely. Paral·lel needs it; without it the word is misread.
It is a genuine orthographic character and it is frequently typed as a full stop, a hyphen or nothing at all, because reaching it on a keyboard is awkward. The Spanish layout provides it; a US layout does not.
Catalan also uses both accents — acute and grave — with the choice determined by vowel quality rather than position, which is a rule Spanish speakers learning Catalan reliably get wrong.
Questions about typing in Catalan
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.
Does the difficulty ever stop rising?
There is a ceiling, and almost nobody meets it. In practice a round ends because the pace passed what you can hold rather than because the game ran out of levels — which is the intended shape, since a game that ends on a timer tells you nothing about your typing.
Do I need a Catalan keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 5 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 12% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Catalan keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 5 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 100 practice words between them use 28 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 keys you actually press, which for an input method are the Latin ones already printed on them.
What will I actually be typing in Catalan?
100 of the most common words in Catalan, drawn at random. They use 28 distinct characters between them and average 4.3 written units each, with the longest running to about 9. 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 Catalan hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 12% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 5 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 Catalan: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- How to type fasterSix changes that raise typing speed, in the order worth making them. Most people's fastest gain is not typing faster — it is stopping mistakes.
- Average typing speedWhat the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.
- Typing postureMost posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.