GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Esperanto
Esperanto typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Esperanto. 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 Esperanto with games
Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ŝ.
The awkward part of Esperanto is not the alphabet, it is the 4 characters these practice words put outside it: ŭ, ĉ, ĝ and ŝ. 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 13% of the practice words.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 75% of everything these Esperanto 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.
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 101 common Esperanto words — 25 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.2 written units per word. Only the pacing changes, and it changes upward — four clean hits raise the level, and nothing lowers it again.
The temptation in Esperanto is to skip the accents while drilling and add them later. It does not work — the accent is part of the motion, and a hand that has practised the word without it has practised a different word. Drill them from the start, awkward as the first week is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 101
- Distinct characters
- 25
- Average word
- 4.2 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Esperanto practice words
- ŭ6
- ĉ3
- ĝ2
- ŝ2
Counted across the 101 practice words. 13% of them need at least one.
kaj la de en al por ne estas kun tre multe boneSix accented letters and the workarounds they caused
Esperanto uses six letters with diacritics — ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and ŭ — that appear in no other language, which meant that for most of the twentieth century typing Esperanto properly was genuinely difficult. No typewriter had them and no early character encoding included them.
Two workarounds became conventions. The h-system, which Zamenhof himself proposed, writes ch, gh, hh, jh, sh and u. The x-system writes cx, gx, hx, jx, sx and ux, which is unambiguous because x is not otherwise an Esperanto letter, and is consequently what most software converts from.
Unicode settled the underlying problem, and the systems persist because keyboards did not follow. Most Esperanto typists still use an x-system converter rather than a dedicated layout.
Questions about typing in Esperanto
Do I need an Esperanto keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ŭ, ĉ, ĝ and ŝ — are reachable on the keyboard you already own once the right layout is selected in your operating system's settings. Some layouts give them their own keys, others build them from a modifier; either way the hardware is unchanged.
Which Esperanto keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 101 practice words between them use 25 of those 30, 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.
What will I actually be typing in Esperanto?
101 of the most common words in Esperanto, drawn at random. They use 25 distinct characters between them and average 4.2 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 Esperanto hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 13% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 4 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 the games use real Esperanto words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Esperanto 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.
Do I need an account, and is it free?
No, and it is free either way. Every lesson, drill, test and game works signed out, with your progress kept in this browser. An account adds three things only: your progress and settings follow you to another device, your streak survives clearing your browser data, and you can appear on the leaderboards under a name you choose.
Also in Esperanto: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Haitian Creole. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard layoutsQWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY, QWERTZ and the non-Latin layouts — what each one changes, and whether switching is worth it.
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- 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.