GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Čeština
Czech typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Czech. 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 Czech with games
Czech uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 9 characters beyond a-z — ý, á, ě, ž, í and more.
Czech (Čeština) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 47% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 9 characters outside a-z: ý, á, ě, ž, í, č, ď and ř, among others. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 45 practice words, 30 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 9% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 65%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
Most people arrive at Czech able to type and unable to type Czech, which is a narrower problem than it feels. The letter keys are already done. What is left is a small number of positions, and the willingness to reach for them rather than paste them in.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 45 common Czech words — 30 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.5 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 45
- Distinct characters
- 30
- Average word
- 3.5 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Czech practice words
- ý9
- á3
- ě3
- ž3
- í2
- č1
- ď1
- ř1
- š1
Counted across the 45 practice words. 47% of them need at least one.
klidné ruce najdou domácí řadu bez nutnosti dívat seDiacritics on the number row
The Czech layout is QWERTZ, and it does something that startles people coming from English: the number row carries the accented letters — ě, š, č, ř, ž, ý, á, í, é — as unshifted keys. Digits require shift.
This is a defensible trade in a language where those letters are far more frequent than numerals, and it is intensely annoying for anyone typing numbers. Most Czech typists learn the number pad or switch layouts for data entry.
The háček, the small v-shaped mark, is handled by a dead key for the letters that do not get their own position. Slovak uses a closely related layout with its own set of letters, including the ĺ and ŕ that Czech does not have.
Questions about typing in Czech
Do I need a Czech keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces ý, á, ě, ž and í from the keys you have — through a dead key on some, a modifier such as right Alt on others. Which one depends on the language and on the layout you select; the hardware does not change either way.
Which Czech keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 9 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 45 practice words between them use 30 of those 35, 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.
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.
Will playing improve my Czech typing?
It will improve your recall of keys you have already drilled, which is a real and specific benefit. It will not build the finger positions in the first place — pressure is a poor teacher and an excellent examiner. Use the lessons to learn a key and a game to find out whether you actually did.
Do the games use real Czech words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Czech 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.
What will I actually be typing in Czech?
45 of the most common words in Czech, drawn at random. They use 30 distinct characters between them and average 3.5 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 Czech hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 47% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 9 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?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 45 Czech 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 Czech: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- 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.