GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Te Reo Māori
Māori typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Māori. 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 Māori with games
Māori uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ā, ō, ē, ū.
Games here are practice with a failure condition, not a different activity: same words as the speed test, same script, same layout. The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 86 common Māori words — 18 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.3 written units per word. Only the pacing changes, and it changes upward — four clean hits raise the level, and nothing lowers it again.
Of the 18 characters these 86 words use, one alone accounts for roughly 19%. Frequencies like that are why touch typing can be learned at all — you are not memorising 18 equally important characters, you are automating a handful and filling in the rest over time.
Māori sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 4 more: ā, ō, ē and ū. 28% 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 temptation in Māori 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
- 18
- Average word
- 4.3 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Māori practice words
- ā18
- ō3
- ē2
- ū2
Counted across the 86 practice words. 28% of them need at least one.
me te ngā ki he kei kua tino nui iti hou paiThe macron, and why it is not optional
Te reo Māori uses fifteen letters — five vowels, eight consonants and the digraphs wh and ng — which makes it one of the smallest alphabets here. The vowels can be long or short, and length is marked with a macron: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū.
The macron matters. Keke is cake, kēkē is armpit; it is a routine example precisely because the difference is not subtle. Written Māori went without macrons for much of the twentieth century and their use is now standard, so older text and newer text differ visibly.
A double vowel is sometimes used instead where a macron is hard to type, and the Māori keyboard layout available on most systems produces macrons with a modifier key.
Questions about typing in Māori
Do I need a Māori keyboard?
No. The characters beyond a-z in these practice words — ā, ō, ē and ū — 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 Māori keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 4 characters beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 86 practice words between them use 18 of those 30, so 12 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 Māori?
86 of the most common words in Māori, drawn at random. They use 18 distinct characters between them and average 4.3 written units each, with the longest running to about 8. 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 Māori hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 28% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, 4 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 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 game should I start with?
Whichever appeals — they pressure different things. Falling words reward finishing what you started; the orbit rewards picking a target and committing; the shrinking timer rewards not hesitating. If you are trying to fix hesitation specifically, the third one is the unpleasant and effective choice.
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 Māori: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Do typing games help, and what do they measure?Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
- Typing accented letters and symbolsDead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.
- 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.