GAME 01
Drift
Clear the sky
Words fall in gently and pick up speed. Type one, press space, watch it burst.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE · Yorùbá
Yoruba typing games
Make repetition feel lighter. Three short games, all played in Yoruba. 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 Yoruba with games
Yoruba is written in the Latin alphabet. Every practice word here stays inside it: 26 letter keys and nothing beyond them.
Yoruba is written with the plain Latin alphabet and nothing else: not one of the 79 practice words here needs a character beyond the 26 letter keys. That makes it the shortest route into touch typing, because every key you learn is one you already have. The only thing between you and fluency is the habit of not looking down.
The speed test and the games draw on one bank of 79 common Yoruba words — 20 distinct characters in all, averaging 3.6 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.
Yoruba's 79-word bank draws on 20 characters, and they are wildly unequal in how often they turn up — the commonest is about 16% 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.
Accuracy first is not a slogan, it is the ordering that works. Typing Yoruba quickly at a 90% hit rate is slower in practice than typing it steadily at 99%, because every error costs a backspace, a re-aim and the rhythm you had.
- Writing system
- Latin
- Keyboard layout
- Latin QWERTY family
- Direction
- left to right
- Practice words
- 79
- Distinct characters
- 20
- Average word
- 3.6 units
Characters you will press most in these Yoruba words
- o45
- a35
- i31
- e29
- r23
- n21
- b15
- u15
- k11
- l8
- s8
- g7
Counted across the 79 practice words — the characters worth getting right first.
ati ni si ti fun pe ko wa pupo dara nla kekereUnderdots and tone marks, stacked
Yoruba is a tonal language with three tones, marked with acute and grave accents over vowels, or left unmarked for the mid tone. Separately, three letters carry a dot below — ẹ, ọ and ṣ — which distinguishes them from e, o and s as different sounds.
The two systems combine, so a single letter can carry a dot underneath and an accent above at the same time. That is a genuine difficulty for typing: the combination has to be built from a base letter and two combining marks, and many keyboards and fonts handle it poorly.
A great deal of Yoruba online is written without either, which is readable in context and ambiguous out of it — the same letters with different tones are frequently different words.
That includes the practice words on this page, and it is worth saying so rather than leaving you to notice. They are written in the plain form, which is the common informal register and is not correct orthography. Writing them properly needs a Yoruba speaker to check every tone, and guessing at tones in a tool whose purpose is that people practise typing them would be worse than admitting the gap.
Questions about typing in Yoruba
Do I need a Yoruba keyboard?
No. Nothing in these Yoruba practice words leaves the 26 letter keys already printed on your keyboard, so there is nothing to install or configure.
Which Yoruba keyboard layout do these games use?
Latin QWERTY family. The 79 practice words between them use 20 of those 26, 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.
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 Yoruba?
79 of the most common words in Yoruba, drawn at random. They use 20 distinct characters between them and average 3.6 written units each, with the longest running to about 11. 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 Yoruba hard to type?
No — Yoruba is about as gentle an introduction to touch typing as exists. No accents, no layout change, a fairly compact inventory of 20 characters across the practice bank, and every key already under your fingers. Whatever difficulty you meet is the difficulty of touch typing itself, not of this language.
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 Yoruba: lessons and the speed test.
Other languages written in Latin: Zulu, Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan. Or browse all 86 by writing system.
Further reading
- 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.
- The bottom rowZ X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.