TIMED PRACTICE · Te Reo Māori
Māori typing speed test
Flow like a stream. Space commits a word, backspace fixes the last one. Tab or Esc restarts.
Testing your Māori typing speed
Māori uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 4 characters beyond a-z — ā, ō, ē, ū.
Māori (Te Reo Māori) is a Latin-script language with a tail. Twenty-six keys carry most of it, and then 28% of the practice words here reach past them for one of the 4 characters outside a-z: ā, ō, ē and ū. Where those live depends on the layout you have selected; the guide shows a Latin QWERTY family arrangement.
The test is configurable rather than fixed — 15 seconds to 10 minutes, or a set number of words, or your own pasted text. 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. Every run samples it again. The summary separates raw speed from net speed, so you can see exactly what your errors cost you.
Speed in Māori 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 83% of everything these Māori 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
- 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, though you do need the right layout selected. 4 characters in the practice words here sit outside a-z, and they come up in 28% of those words — often enough that copying them from a character map will hold you back, and rare enough that people try to.
Which Māori keyboard layout do these tests 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.
Why is my Māori speed lower than my English speed?
Because you are doing two things at once: finding the key and recalling what it writes. Speed in a script you have typed for years is one motion; speed in a new one is a lookup followed by a motion. The lookup is what disappears with practice, and when it does the gap closes faster than most people expect.
Is the Māori typing test the same every time?
No. Words are drawn at random from the Māori bank on every run, so there is nothing to memorise and a second attempt is a fresh test rather than a rehearsal. You can fix the duration or the word count, turn punctuation and numbers on, or paste your own text.
What is the difference between raw and net WPM?
Raw counts everything you typed; net subtracts what you got wrong and left wrong. A large gap between the two is the most useful signal on the results screen — it means the speed is there and the accuracy is not, which is a different problem from simply being slow, and a faster one to fix.
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?
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 Māori: lessons 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.