Malti · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Maltese
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 Maltese they produce the letters printed on them. The 3 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 Maltese
Maltese uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 3 characters beyond a-z — ħ, ż, ġ.
The awkward part of Maltese is not the alphabet, it is the 3 characters these practice words put outside it: ħ, ż and ġ. Whether your layout gives them a dedicated key or builds them from a modifier, the reach has to become a trained motion rather than a decision — they turn up in 31% of the practice words.
Nine stages take you from the home row outwards, adding a few keys at a time and drilling them as sequences rather than as words — the point at this stage is the position, not the vocabulary. Each stage holds several drills, and each drill wants three clean passes before it counts — by default, and Settings will change it: not three attempts, three clean ones. Slower at the start, considerably faster by the middle.
The distribution is lopsided, which is the useful part. Across the 91 practice words, 26 distinct characters appear — and the single most common accounts for about 12% of every letter typed, with the top ten covering roughly 69%. Drilling the frequent ones first is where almost all of the benefit is.
The temptation in Maltese 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
- 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.
The drills do not include ħ, ż or ġ. 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 3 characters Maltese 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.
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. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ħ, ż and ġ — 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.
Where should I start with Maltese?
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 Maltese 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.
How long does learning to touch type in Maltese take?
Longer than a week and shorter than you fear — and it depends far more on how often you practise than on how long each session runs. Short daily sessions beat long weekly ones by a wide margin, because what you are building is recall and recall decays between sessions. The streak counter exists for that reason.
Can I skip ahead to a later stage?
Yes, nothing is locked. It is usually a mistake, though, because each stage assumes the keys before it have stopped needing thought — and a stage practised on top of a shaky one tends to embed the shakiness rather than fix it.
Which Maltese keyboard layout do these lessons 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?
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 91 common Maltese words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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, 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 Maltese: the speed test and typing games.
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.