GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Монгол
Mongolian typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Mongolian. 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 Mongolian with games
Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic script. The Mongolian Cyrillic layout maps 28 characters across the keys you already have, so every motion transfers and every letter moves.
Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, so a Mongolian Cyrillic keyboard puts a different letter under every finger you already know. 28 keys are remapped, and that is the entire difficulty: the motions are the ones you have, aimed at different letters.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 88 common Mongolian words — 27 distinct characters in all, averaging 4 written units per word. All three games pull from it, so the vocabulary you meet while playing is the vocabulary the speed test measures you on. Difficulty rises with every four clean hits and never falls back — a round ends when you stop keeping up, rather than when a timer decides.
Mongolian's 88-word bank draws on 27 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 13% of all letters typed, the rarest a fraction of one. The lessons follow that gradient deliberately, which is why the home row comes first and the awkward reaches come last.
The hard part of Mongolian is not the hands, it is the map. Most people find the motions transfer immediately and the recall does not: you know the key you want and cannot say where it is. That gap closes with repetition, and closes faster if you resist looking.
- Writing system
- Cyrillic
- Keyboard layout
- Mongolian Cyrillic
- Direction
- left to right
- Mapped characters
- 28
- Practice words
- 88
- Distinct characters
- 27
- Average word
- 4 units
Characters you will press most in these Mongolian words
- а47
- х36
- э23
- и21
- у19
- н18
- г17
- о16
- р16
- д14
- л12
- м12
Counted across the 88 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
тайван гар үндсэн эгнээг хялбар олдогCyrillic in Mongolia, traditional script in Inner Mongolia
Mongolian in Mongolia has been written in Cyrillic since the 1940s, and that is what these lessons teach. The layout is Cyrillic but it is not ЙЦУКЕН, despite being described that way almost everywhere: its top row starts ФЦУЖЭН and it differs from the Russian arrangement on nineteen of the twenty-eight keys the two have in common. It also carries ө and ү, which Mongolian uses heavily and Russian does not have.
The traditional Mongolian script — the vertical one, written in columns running top to bottom and left to right — remains in official use in Inner Mongolia and has been the subject of a revival effort in Mongolia itself. It is genuinely difficult to support on a computer: vertical text layout and extensive contextual letter shaping make it one of the harder writing systems to render correctly, and support is still uneven.
If you need the traditional script specifically, this is not the tool for it, and it is better to say so than to pretend otherwise.
Questions about typing in Mongolian
Do I need a Mongolian keyboard?
No, and this is the part people most often get wrong. A Mongolian keyboard is a software setting: add the Mongolian Cyrillic layout in your operating system's keyboard settings and the keys under your fingers begin producing Cyrillic characters. Keycaps with Cyrillic letters printed on them are a convenience for people who look down, and if you are learning to touch type you are learning not to.
Which Mongolian keyboard layout do these games use?
Mongolian Cyrillic, with 28 characters mapped across the standard key positions. The 88 practice words between them use 27 of those 28, so the drills reach very nearly all of the layout rather than a comfortable corner. The keyboard guide below the typing area shows the physical key and the character it produces together, so you are never reading a layout diagram in one window while typing in another.
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 games help, or are they just a break?
Both, honestly. They will not teach you a key you have never drilled, and they are very good at exposing which keys you only think you know — under time pressure the shaky ones fail first. Treat them as a diagnostic and the lessons as the fix.
Does the difficulty ever stop rising?
There is a ceiling, and almost nobody meets it. In practice a round ends because the pace passed what you can hold rather than because the game ran out of levels — which is the intended shape, since a game that ends on a timer tells you nothing about your typing.
What will I actually be typing in Mongolian?
88 of the most common words in Mongolian, drawn at random. They use 27 distinct characters between them and average 4 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 Mongolian hard to type?
Harder to start, not harder to reach. Every motion you already have transfers; what does not is the map, and 28 key positions have to be relearned. With a fairly compact inventory of 27 characters across the practice bank, most people are past the worst of it inside two weeks of short daily sessions.
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 Mongolian: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Cyrillic: Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kazakh. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboardsWhy the standard Russian layout ignores the letters on your keycaps, when a phonetic layout is defensible, and how far the eight Cyrillic layouts differ.
- Typing codeCode is symbol-dense, punctuation-heavy and hard on the little fingers. Why fast prose typists are often mediocre code typists, and what to drill.
- Typing in a second scriptIf you already touch type, your hands transfer completely and your recall does not. What that gap feels like, why it closes, and how to shorten it.