Why station names make a good typing game
Most typing practice is random words. A subway line gives you a list that already means something, in an order you can see on a map. That was the idea behind HelloSubway.
October 5, 2026 · 1 min read
HelloSubway started with a plain observation. Typing drills hand you lists of unrelated words. A subway line hands you a list of real places in a fixed order, with a map and a photograph to go with each one. The list never changes, so you get faster at it, and you learn something about the city as you go.
What is in the game
The game has about 1,800 stations on 84 lines in six cities: Seoul, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore. Nearly every station has a photograph of a place near it, taken from Wikimedia Commons under a free licence, and the credits are shown on the page. We check the station order and the coordinates against OpenStreetMap wherever it has the route, and each line page tells you when it opened.
What it is not
We do not claim that typing station names will make you a better typist in general. It will make you quicker at the names you practise, and it will make the Paris or Tokyo map less intimidating, and that is enough. If you want a structured typing course, a dedicated course will do more. If you want ten minutes with a sense of place, this is the right shape. There is a practice routine for exactly that.
Where to begin
Choose a city you know or one you plan to visit, pick a short line, and type it once. The guide explains the scoring, and the city pages show every line with its difficulty. For the names that are hardest to type, see the longest station names.
More stories
TypingWords, characters, keystrokes: how typing speed is measuredWPM sounds simple. The number depends on what you count as a word, when the clock starts and what you do with mistakes.
TypingHow a Korean keyboard builds a syllable, and what it means for station namesHangul has 24 basic letters and thousands of syllables. The keyboard has one key per letter, and the computer does the stacking.
TypingTyping Japanese station names in romajiMost Japanese computer users type the sound of a word in Latin letters and let the software turn it into kana and kanji. That is how this game works too.