Touch Typing for Beginners: A Realistic Plan

Ashiqur Rahman··7 min read

Touch typing means typing without looking at the keys: each finger has its own keys, your hands rest on the home row, and your muscle memory does the finding. To learn it, set your hands on the home row, learn the rows in order, keep your accuracy at about 95% or better before you move on, and practice a little every day. This guide lays out that path using the free lessons on this site.

One thing we will not do is promise a number of days. Typing-course websites give timelines that range from a couple of weeks to a few months, and we could not find a controlled study behind those figures. People start from different places and practice at different rates. A better measure than the calendar is whether you can finish a lesson accurately without looking at the keys.

What touch typing is

According to Wikipedia's Touch typing article, it is a style of typing that does not rely on sight to find the keys. It depends on muscle memory instead. The home row is A S D F for the left hand and J K L ; for the right, and touch typists keep their fingers on those keys and return to them after each reach. Most keyboards have small raised marks on F and J so your index fingers can find home by touch. The method is usually traced to the late 1880s: the article reports that a court stenographer, Frank E. McGurrin, won a widely publicised typing contest in 1888.

Do you need touch typing to be fast?

Not strictly, and it is worth knowing. A large study of 168,960 typists, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, CHI 2018), found that people who reported typing training were on average only about 5 WPM faster than those who did not. The University of Cambridge's write-up of the study adds that self-taught typists who use fewer than ten fingers can be as fast as touch typists.

What touch typing gives you is a clear, repeatable method: a fixed finger for each key, no hunting, and no need to look down. In the same study, participants reporting more fingers tended to be faster, and fast typists reported about 8.4 fingers on average against 5.3 for slow typists. That is a correlation, not proof, but it is a good reason to learn a consistent system if you are starting from scratch.

Before you start

  • Set up your desk. Elbows near keyboard height, wrists straight, feet supported. Our posture and wrist pain guide covers this with OSHA guidance.
  • Use the QWERTY layout. The lessons and the finger map on this site use the standard QWERTY keyboard only.
  • Place your hands. Left fingers on A S D F, right fingers on J K L ;, both thumbs resting on the space bar. Feel for the bumps on F and J.
  • See the whole map. The keyboard guide colours every key by the finger that owns it.

The beginner path, step by step

The typing lessons are a course of 34 lessons in six stages. Each attempt builds new text from only the keys you have met so far, and keys outside the current lesson are dimmed on the live keyboard.

  1. Home row (lessons 1 to 5). F J, D K, S L, A and the semicolon, then G H. Spend as long as you need here, because everything else is a reach from this position.
  2. Top row (6 to 10). E I, R U, T Y, O P and W Q, a pair at a time. Return to the home row after every reach.
  3. Bottom row (11 to 16). V M, C and the comma, X and the full stop, Z and the slash, B N, then all the letters together.
  4. Shift and punctuation (17 to 22). Capitals with each Shift key, full stops, the apostrophe, question and exclamation marks, then quotes, colon, semicolon and hyphen.
  5. Numbers and symbols (23 to 28). The number row, which sits furthest from the home row, in two halves, then mixed numbers, shifted symbols and brackets.
  6. Speed and accuracy (29 to 34). Common words, sentences, passages, a 98% accuracy challenge, speed practice and a final passage.

To move on you need 95% accuracy. If you miss, the lesson restarts with new text, and after three misses you can choose to move on anyway. The order and the pass mark are our own design, not a proven method. You can repeat any lesson you have opened by choosing it at the top.

How to practice

These are our suggestions, not tested rules.

  • Little and often. About 10 to 20 minutes on most days is easier to keep up than a long session now and then. The researchers behind the study above also advise practising deliberately, because people can slip back into less efficient habits.
  • Accuracy before speed. If you keep missing the pass mark, slow down until the lesson feels clean. Speed grows from control.
  • Eyes on the text. If you catch yourself glancing at the keys, slow down further instead of speeding up. The live keyboard is there so you do not need to look down.
  • Stop when tired. If accuracy drops sharply, come back later.

How long will it take?

We cannot say, and neither can anyone who has not measured you. Instead of counting days, use checkpoints:

  • You can pass the home row stage (lessons 1 to 5) at 95% accuracy with your eyes on the text.
  • You can pass the Shift and punctuation stage (lessons 17 to 22) at that accuracy.
  • Your speed test results become steady: the middle of three runs stays within a few WPM from week to week.

Wikipedia notes that around 60 to 80 WPM is roughly the speed needed to keep up with your thoughts, which gives you a rough long-term target. For the evidence on what typical speeds look like, see what is a good typing speed, and for a week-by-week practice schedule see the plan in how to type faster.

Common beginner problems

  • Looking down constantly. Normal at first. Slow your speed so you can afford to keep your eyes up.
  • Weak little fingers. Errors on Q, A, Z, P, the semicolon and the slash can point to the little fingers. Check your weakest keys on the progress page and drill them in typing practice.
  • Accuracy dropping when you add speed. Go back to the pace where you were clean and increase in small steps. More on this in how to improve typing accuracy.
  • Feeling stuck. Progress is rarely smooth. Look at the trend across ten or more runs on the progress page, not at any single result.
  • Aching hands or wrists. Stop and check your setup. If you have pain, numbness or tingling that does not go away, see a doctor.

After the lessons

When you can pass the whole course, move to typing practice for volume and weak-key work, and take the typing speed test every week or two to see how you are doing. For the science behind why repetition works, read muscle memory and touch typing.

Sources

  • Wikipedia, Touch typing: definition, home row, the F and J markers, the 1888 contest and the 60 to 80 WPM remark.
  • Dhakal V, Feit AM, Kristensson PO, Oulasvirta A. Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. CHI 2018. Training and finger-count figures are taken from the paper's results.
  • University of Cambridge, What makes a faster typist? The researchers' remarks on finger use and deliberate practice.
  • The course structure and the unlock behaviour are described in our typing lessons guide. The lesson order, the 95% pass mark, the session length and the checkpoints are FreeTyper's own design and suggestions.

Written by Ashiqur Rahman. Figures attributed to a source were checked against that source. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will correct it.

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