GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Malti
Maltese typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Maltese. 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 Maltese with games
Maltese uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — ħ, ż, ġ.
Maltese (Malti) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 31% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 3 characters outside a-z: ħ, ż and ġ. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The three games differ in what they pressure. One drops words you must finish before they land, one puts characters on a moving orbit, and one hands you a clock that shrinks every time you succeed. All three run on 91 common Maltese words, and all three level up every four clean hits and never level down.
Speed in Maltese 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.
A frequency count of the bank explains why early progress feels fast and later progress does not. The top ten characters cover about 69% of everything these Maltese 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.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 91
- Distinct characters
- 26
- Average word
- 4.5 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Maltese practice words
- ħ23
- ż4
- ġ3
Counted across the 91 practice words. 31% of them need at least one.
u il ta li fi ma biex mhux ħafna tajjeb kbir żgħirA Semitic language in the Latin alphabet
Maltese is descended from Arabic and is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet — and the only one that is an official language of the European Union. Its orthography was standardised in 1924.
Four letters are particular to it: ċ, ġ, ħ and ż, plus the digraph għ, which is historically a pharyngeal consonant and is now mostly silent while still affecting the vowels around it. ħ is a letter in its own right, not an h with a line through it.
The Maltese keyboard is a UK QWERTY layout with those four letters added. Because the language draws vocabulary from Arabic, Italian and English in roughly equal measure, a Maltese typist switches between all three more often than most.
Questions about typing in Maltese
Do I need a Maltese keyboard?
No, though you do need the right layout selected. 3 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 31% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Maltese keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 3 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 91 practice words between them use 26 of those 29, so 3 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 Maltese?
91 of the most common words in Maltese, drawn at random. They use 26 distinct characters between them and average 4.5 written units each, with the longest running to about 10. Short, frequent words are used on purpose: they are the ones your hands will meet most often outside a lesson, so the practice transfers.
Do the games use real Maltese words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Maltese 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.
Is Maltese hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 31% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 3 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 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 Maltese: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Māori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Keyboard shortcuts worth learningThe text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
- The home rowASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
- How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measuredThirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.