As a kid, I started typing through ’90s PC games like Fate and Triad games, but it wasn’t until the covid pandemic that I finally gave up serious hunting and cattle skills and learned touch. typing
If you don’t know how to touch type, there are easy ways you can teach yourself. You may think you’re good at working with the keys, but with a little effort you can learn to type faster, use your fingers more ergonomically, and rarely take your eyes off the back of your head to click. – clack-clack throughout.
If you rely on just a few fingers to type, chances are you’ll have to adjust a bit and get your idle fingers to work. At first, you can type so slowly and sloppily as you learn which fingers are responsible for which keys, but that’s okay. Even if you start with 20 wpm, the key is to focus on accuracy and build that new muscle memory from scratch. Like playing a musical organ, play the first correct notes: then go faster.
Touch typing starts with the anchor fingers in the first row. On a QWERTY keyboard layout, that means resting your left fingers on A, S, D, F, while your right fingers rest on J, K, L, semicolon. Both thumbs should go into the bar space. Do you feel a small bump, bump, or other meaning in the F and J keys? Most keys have some sort of accent that makes these two keys feel different. This way, you can find these great cues for your anchor index fingers, and the rest will fall into place, even without looking.
It’s easy to get started with a variety of tools, most of which are free, that make the writing experience simple and even fun. In this article, I’ll first walk you through the different options to try for yourself, and add some pros and cons that will help you learn a new finger muscle memory to become much, much faster.
My favorite writing apps
Keybr starts with tight keys and gradually becomes clearer as you practice them.
When it comes to free resources for learning touch typing, I recommend using Keybr to browse the desktop. This site automatically generates typing lessons for you by measuring your starting ability (accuracy and speed) and generates practice lessons that are used in the most common first letters. Then he slowly begins to write more letters and use his fingers. A combination of real words and fictional words that follow familiar phonetic structures, so your fingers work without abstracting any semblance of speech.
By creating an account with Keybr (via email, Google or Facebook logins), you can save your progress and read where you left off. Keybr also offers a premium account for a $10 one-time purchase that removes ads and disables trackers, although the documentation on the page isn’t very overbearing.
The key to using Keybr, as with any writing tool, is consistency. Keep practicing every day and the program will teach you all the keys before you know it. Once you’ve “unlocked” all the keys, focus on moving forward and predicting. Your speed increases slowly over time.
You can see from my practice calendar that my best training period was about six weeks of fairly consistent practice. Keybr also saves other nifty facts about your progress to the profile, like the best and worst lyrics.
And then only when you start to gain some confidence, try turning on capital letters and punctuation in the Keybr settings. I’m sure you’ll suck at first, but eventually you’ll learn the keys to change. It is best dictated that you use the little finger of the opposite hand that you type capital letters, but in reality, I am sure that most of us have it wrong.
I don’t like that Keybr adds punctuation and punctuation to each word when you enable those settings, but you can always turn them off when you want to refocus the character speed. Also, when you start to feel like typing without looking, you can always switch from Keybr to another program that incorporates more capitalization and symbols.
Monkey provides countless controls for your home typing lessons. For example, I edited mine with a border of colors (which you can also use), while a text message was sent by a user to the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
When you start typing you used to touch, hold the place back to the Monkey type. Monkey Race is the most elegant and customizable tessellated skip I’ve seen. Its clean interface allows you to load and craft some expressions in a second, or you can go into the options and customize something unique. The site has all kinds of great templates and styles for you to customize. You can test based on time or phrase length, and you can also choose to insert punctuation, punctuation, longer or shorter passages or extra difficult parameters, such as if you miss one or below the word threshold it will fail for minutes. . You can also note randomly generated evidence that is drawn from clips from movies, books, and TV shows.
There’s really a lot of fun stuff to play with in Monkeytype, from color design to weird graphic effects that can test your thresholds for motion sickness as much as your writing.
Little Women isn’t just a timeless American coming-of-age novel, it’s a fun typing exercise.
Want to write while reading classics by George Orwell, Dante Alighieri, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and more? TypeLit.io has dozens of books for you to practice writing, like War of the Worlds or Sense and Sensibility. There is also William Strunk Jr. Elements of Style so you can learn the English-American writing style of the 1920s as you type.
This may be a novelty, but the way of writing is beautiful. It provides 1,000 pages of actual literary text, which makes it a good exercise.
It looks basic, but Typing Trainer gets the job done and has some useful lessons if you want to practice specific typing problems.
Prepare some data layout and graphics. Typing Trainer may look like a cheesy program to kids, but it is still an effective learning tool. You can progress through a series of courses from the beginning or jump into some strategic challenges.
Instructed Typing You can also play some browser games where you can park or fly through foreign spaces by, you guessed it, typing. They’re pretty basic, with an early 2000s flash game aesthetic, but the tricks are fun to play.
Oh gosh! What the hell is going on with the toad face on this title screen?
Many of us may remember the 1992 DOS classic Mario Teaches Typing, made for Nintendo by Interplay. Now you can play the entire game for free courtesy of the Internet Browser Archive. It is very dated and perhaps not the best way to learn it today as it is stuck in the ancient ways of cruelty, using many repetitions of single letters and repetition of sequences, but it is worth it for the laughs and the nostalgic journey. Play fact: this is the first game where Mario has spoken, and his voice lines are hilariously bad, sounding like they have a difficult Italian-American accent.
There is also a prompt writing about the American Civil War that seems to downplay the importance of slavery in the cause of the war. Yes, I remember getting ready to bury some painful baggage there.
Epistles — Epistles Paralipomenon
Not only are you typing your way through the battles in Epistle, but the movement keys are positioned in the first row to keep your hands in the right position. It takes some getting used to, but it’s better in this case than with traditional WASD controls.
Image: Fishing Cactus
Epistles – Scripture Chronicles is a charming steam-based action adventure game with a paper aesthetic that uses writing to inspire your protagonist who fights foxes and monsters while exploring a fantasy world. I sometimes find the letters dry, but it’s a fun game, and I admire its fun spins on the typing genre. It’s a new method to use once I’ve started to get used to touch typing, and if you enjoy it, it also follows that it will come out quickly.
Typing Dead: Overkill
Descending the undead with a rat-a-tat-tat while the heat hits the keys just feels right.
This is a closed-door shooter of the house of the dead games, where you type words to shoot bullets at zombies. Typing Dead: Overkill is a visceral experience that’s good for the low-key writer, though it does feature some of its 2010-based jokes and corny characters based on widespread stereotypes. It’s like a C-movie video game with a B-level script, but I can’t help but enjoy it and recommend it.
More Tips for Learning Typing Skills
Having gone through this learning process myself and a bit of a mechanical keyboard (often two hands go), here are some additional tips and best practices for building your typing skills.
About:
- Exercise regularly. Ideally once a day.
- Make it a habit or practice to start your day with it over your morning coffee.
- Challenge yourself with capital letters, punctuation and numbers. Writing in real life is not just lowercase letters!
- Look for the next word written in the indicator. Type faster when you know what’s coming. Think of it as a nightmare.
- Use the same methods to learn keyboard patterns as keyboards such as Dvorak and Colemak. Sites like Keybr and Simia offer formatting on everything, even though QWERTY is the default.
- Use your newfound love of typing as an excuse to get into a mechanical keyboard. Sure, it won’t help you type faster, but they sound and look great, and it’s fun to aim for the tunnel.
not to do
- Can’t wait for you to hurry up.
- Don’t ignore your types. If the type of trainer allows you to go and fix mistakes, you need to create a habit of doing so.
- Do not overdo the training. Your fingers can get tired, and exercising too much in one session can make you feel tired. Just like when you exercise, recovery and rest are also important. It will likely be a little faster when you pick it up the next day.
- Don’t be elitist in writing. Just because you know how to type doesn’t mean you can judge others for not knowing or typing slowly. Sometimes people online use words per minute (WPM) as a measure of people’s worth or as a form of control, and not in a good way. but to support and encourage others to participate if they are interested.
