Te Reo Māori · Beginner 1(a)
Learn to type in Māori
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 Māori they produce the letters printed on them. The 4 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 Māori
Māori uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ā, ō, ē, ū.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 83% of everything you will type in these Māori drills, and the remaining 8 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.
If you already touch type English, most of Māori transfers on the first session. What does not transfer is the 4 characters this bank reaches for beyond a-z — ā, ō, ē and ū — and they are not decoration: leave them off and the word is misspelled. A steady minority in this bank needs at least one.
The course is deliberately narrow at the beginning: a handful of keys repeated until they are automatic, before anything is added. Nine stages later it has worked across the board, and 86 common Māori words are waiting in the speed test for when the positions stop needing thought. Skipping ahead is possible and usually a mistake, because the later stages assume the earlier ones are already automatic.
Most people arrive at Māori able to type and unable to type Māori, 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.
- 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.
The drills do not include ā, ō, ē or ū. 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 4 characters Māori 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.
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. Your operating system already offers a layout that produces ā, ō, ē and ū 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.
Which Māori keyboard layout do these lessons 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.
How long does learning to touch type in Māori 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.
Why does a drill need three clean passes?
Because one correct attempt proves you can do it and three prove you can repeat it, which is the thing that eventually becomes automatic. Attempts with mistakes in them do not count towards the three — not as a punishment, but because practising an error is how an error becomes a habit. Three is the default rather than a rule: Settings will take it down to one or up to ten.
What will I actually be typing in Māori?
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 86 common Māori words in the practice bank are what the speed test samples and what the games pull from, once the positions stop needing thought.
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 an account, and is it free?
Neither. There is no paid tier and no required sign-in — the 86 Māori 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 Māori: the speed test and typing games.
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.