GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Cymraeg
Welsh typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Welsh. 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 Welsh with games
Welsh uses the Latin alphabet you already have. The practice words here add 1 character beyond a-z — ŵ.
Welsh sits on the same QWERTY keys as English, and these practice words then ask for 1 more character: ŵ. 1% of the practice words here need one — the occasional word — which is often enough that reaching for it should be a trained motion rather than a hunt through a character map.
Not all keys are worth the same. Ten characters carry around 71% of everything you will type in these Welsh drills, and the remaining 11 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.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 92 common Welsh words — 21 distinct characters in all, averaging 4.4 written units per word. A round is short by design, two or three minutes at most, because the value of a game here is attention rather than endurance. The lessons are where the hours go; this is where you find out what has actually stuck.
The temptation in Welsh 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
- 92
- Distinct characters
- 21
- Average word
- 4.4 units
Characters beyond a-z in the Welsh practice words
- ŵ1
Counted across the 92 practice words. 1% of them need at least one.
a y yn i o ar ac yr am at gyda ondDigraphs that count as single letters
Welsh treats eight digraphs — ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, th — as single letters of the alphabet. They are alphabetised as units, so in a Welsh dictionary "llan" comes after "lwc", and a crossword puzzle puts ll in one square.
This has no effect on what you press: each is typed as two keys. It does affect how Welsh words look to an English eye, and it explains why Welsh place names appear to contain improbable letter runs that are in fact ordinary sequences of letters.
Welsh also uses the circumflex — â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ — to mark long vowels, including on w and y, which are vowels in Welsh. Those two are the reason a UK keyboard alone is not quite enough.
Questions about typing in Welsh
Do I need a Welsh keyboard?
No. The character beyond a-z in these practice words — ŵ — is 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.
Will playing improve my Welsh typing?
It will improve your recall of keys you have already drilled, which is a real and specific benefit. It will not build the finger positions in the first place — pressure is a poor teacher and an excellent examiner. Use the lessons to learn a key and a game to find out whether you actually did.
Do the games use real Welsh words?
Yes — all three draw on the same bank of common Welsh words the speed test samples. Nothing is generated or transliterated for the sake of the game, so a score here means the same thing as a score there.
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.
Which Welsh keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family, plus the 1 character beyond a-z that these practice words use. The 92 practice words between them use 21 of those 27, so 6 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 Welsh?
92 of the most common words in Welsh, drawn at random. They use 21 distinct characters between them and average 4.4 written units each, with the longest running to about 10. 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 Welsh hard to type?
Only slightly, if you already touch type. 1% of the practice words need a character outside a-z, one such character appears 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 Welsh: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Yoruba, Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- Adding a keyboard layoutThe step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
- Which finger types which keyThe standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
- The top rowQ through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.