GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Hausa
Hausa typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Hausa. 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 Hausa with games
Hausa uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 1 character beyond a-z — ƙ.
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: 84 common Hausa words.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 76% of everything you will type in these Hausa drills, and the remaining 13 share what is left. That is why the course introduces its material a little at a time rather than all at once: the early characters do a disproportionate amount of the work.
Hausa is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 2% of the practice words here reach past them for the one character outside a-z: ƙ. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The temptation in Hausa 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
- 84
- Distinct characters
- 23
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Hausa practice words
- ƙ2
Counted across the 84 practice words. 2% of them need at least one.
da na a ya ta ba ne ce sosai mai girma ƙaramiHooked letters, and a second script
Hausa in Latin script — Boko — uses four letters with hooks or strokes: ɓ, ɗ, ƙ and ƴ. The first three are implosive consonants, made by drawing air inward, and they contrast with plain b, d and k. They are not decorated versions of those letters; they are separate sounds and separate letters.
This is the main typing obstacle, because the hooked letters are absent from standard keyboards and are frequently replaced with the plain forms online, which loses the distinction.
Hausa is also written in Ajami, an Arabic-based script that predates the Latin orthography and remains in use particularly in religious contexts. These lessons teach Boko, which is the official standard in both Nigeria and Niger.
Questions about typing in Hausa
Will playing improve my Hausa 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 Hausa words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Hausa 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.
Do I need a Hausa keyboard?
No. The character beyond a-z in these practice words — ƙ — is 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 Hausa keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 1 character beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 84 practice words between them use 23 of those 27, so 4 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 Hausa?
84 of the most common words in Hausa, drawn at random. They use 23 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 Hausa hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 2% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, one such character appears 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 Hausa: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.
- 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.