Kreyòl Ayisyen · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Haitian Creole
Home row anchors
Settle both hands on the home row: A S D F for the left, J K L ; for the right.
These are the keys you press, and in Haitian Creole they produce the letters printed on them. The 2 characters beyond a-z in the practice words here come from a modifier or a dead key rather than a key of their own, so they are not shown here.
Learning to type in Haitian Creole
Haitian Creole uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 2 characters beyond a-z — è, ò.
Haitian Creole sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 2 more: è and ò. 16% of the practice words here need one — a steady minority — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
The course is deliberately narrow at the beginning: a handful of keys repeated until they are automatic, before anything is added. Nine stages later it has worked across the board, and 86 common Haitian Creole words are waiting in the speed test for when the positions stop needing thought. Skipping ahead is possible and usually a mistake, because the later stages assume the earlier ones are already automatic.
Haitian Creole's 86-word bank draws on 26 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 13% 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.
The temptation in Haitian Creole 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
- 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.
The drills do not include è or ò. The beginner course builds each drill by remapping the keys through a language’s layout, and there is no key map for Latin QWERTY family yet — so these stages work through the plain a-z letters. The 2 characters Haitian Creole needs beyond them appear in the speed test and the games, which draw on the word bank, and the keyboard guide above shows where they sit on the layout you have selected. It is one of the two things most worth fixing here; the other is that 2 languages have no layout map at all.
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. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — è and ò — 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 Haitian Creole keyboard layout do these lessons 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.
Should I look at the keyboard while I learn?
No, and this is the one piece of advice worth being stubborn about. A glance down is not just a pause — it rehearses the habit of reading the keys instead of remembering them, which is precisely the habit the course exists to replace. Covering your hands for the first fortnight is unpleasant and works.
How often should I practise Haitian Creole?
Briefly and often. What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions, so ten minutes on most days will take you considerably further than an hour once a week. Stop while it is still going well — practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motion.
Where should I start with Haitian Creole?
At the beginning of the beginner course, even if you already touch type in another language. The nine stages start on the home row and add keys outward, and the early ones are short. If Haitian Creole is a script you have never typed, the first stage is doing more work than it looks like — it is building the map, not the speed.
What will I actually be typing in Haitian Creole?
Sequences of the keys each stage has introduced — single letters first, then pairs, then short chunks — written in the Latin QWERTY family layout. The point of the course is the position of a key rather than the vocabulary. The 86 common Haitian Creole words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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.
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 Haitian Creole: the speed test and typing games.
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.