GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Magyar
Hungarian typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Hungarian. 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 Hungarian with games
Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 7 characters beyond a-z — é, á, ő, ú, ó and more.
Hungarian sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 7 more: é, á, ő, ú, ó, ö and ű. 49% of the practice words here need one — a large minority of words — which is often enough that reaching for them should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 60% of everything these Hungarian 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.
Most people arrive at Hungarian able to type and unable to type Hungarian, 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 43 common Hungarian words — 28 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 written units per word. A round is short by design, two or three minutes at most, because the value of a game here is attention rather than endurance. The lessons are where the hours go; this is where you find out what has actually stuck.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 43
- Distinct characters
- 28
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Hungarian practice words
- é8
- á5
- ő3
- ú3
- ó2
- ö1
- ű1
Counted across the 43 practice words. 49% of them need at least one.
nyugodt kezek könnyedén megtalálják az alaphelyzetetLong vowels, and a keyboard with room for all of them
Hungarian distinguishes vowel length in a way that changes meaning, and marks it with acute accents — á, é, í, ó, ú — plus two letters found in almost no other language: ő and ű, with double acute accents, which are the long forms of ö and ü.
The Hungarian QWERTZ layout gives all of them dedicated keys, which crowds the right-hand side of the keyboard considerably. There is no dead-key shortcut to learn; they are simply keys, and there are a lot of them.
Hungarian also treats several digraphs — cs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs — and the trigraph dzs as single letters for alphabetisation. That affects dictionaries rather than typing, but it explains why a Hungarian word looks longer than it sounds.
Questions about typing in Hungarian
Do I need a Hungarian keyboard?
No. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces é, á, ő, ú and ó 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.
Do the games use real Hungarian words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Hungarian 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.
Which Hungarian keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 7 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 43 practice words between them use 28 of those 33, 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 Hungarian?
43 of the most common words in Hungarian, drawn at random. They use 28 distinct characters between them and average 3.6 written units each, with the longest running to about 6. 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 Hungarian hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 49% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 7 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 43 Hungarian 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 Hungarian: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Javanese, Latvian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Average typing speedWhat the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.
- Typing postureMost posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.
- Why your typing speed stopped improvingNearly everyone stalls somewhere in the middle. What causes a typing plateau, why more of the same practice does not clear it, and what does.