GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Kreyòl Ayisyen
Haitian Creole typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Haitian Creole. 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 Haitian Creole with games
Haitian Creole uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — è, ò.
If you already touch type English, most of Haitian Creole transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 2 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — è and ò — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A steady minority in this bank needs at least one.
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 86 common Haitian Creole words — 26 distinct characters in all, averaging 4 written units per word. Only the pacing changes, and it changes upward — four clean hits raise the level, and nothing lowers it again.
Speed in Haitian Creole 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.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 86 practice words, 26 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 13% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 70%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 86
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Haitian Creole practice words
- è12
- ò2
Counted across the 86 practice words. 16% of them need at least one.
ak nan se pa pou yon li yo anpil byen gwo pitiA phonemic spelling system, by design
Haitian Creole has an orthography standardised in 1979 that is almost perfectly phonemic: one sound, one spelling, throughout. That was a deliberate break from writing the language as though it were French, and it makes Haitian Creole considerably easier to spell than its vocabulary would suggest.
It uses è, ò and the nasal vowels an, en, on, plus a grave accent to distinguish vowels where needed. There is no circumflex, no cedilla and none of the silent letters French carries, so words that share a root with French look strikingly different: French "toujours" is "toujou".
Typing it needs only a layout with grave accents, and most Haitian typists use a French or US-international keyboard.
Questions about typing in Haitian Creole
Do I need a Haitian Creole keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 2 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 16% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Haitian Creole keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 2 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 86 practice words between them use 26 of those 28, 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 Haitian Creole?
86 of the most common words in Haitian Creole, drawn at random. They use 26 distinct characters between them and average 4 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 Haitian Creole hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 16% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 2 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.
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 Haitian Creole 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 Haitian Creole words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Haitian Creole 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 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 Haitian Creole: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Hausa, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing accuracyWhat an accuracy percentage really means, why an error costs more than one keystroke, and how to fix accuracy without simply slowing down forever.
- 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.