Ask HN: Why is touch typing reducing my speed
I cant learn to touch type no matter how hard i try. First i made typos now I type slow It takes a lot of time. Months at least. Sort of like learning a musical instrument. You'll hit a point where you slow down before you can speed up. One mistake I made when learning to touch type was prioritizing speed over accuracy. Typing games made it worse. Try to get at least 98% accuracy first, and then you'll naturally learn speed. You learned to walk one step at a time, and need to master walking before learning to run. Don't stress yourself out over it. That slows the learning. Just observe yourself typing. Observe your mistakes. Don't blame yourself when you do make a mistake. Useful sites: https://colemak.academy/ (you can set it to QWERTY and then practice one part of the keyboard at a time) These can be really boring sometimes and you'll hit a plateau, so feel free to just get Typing of the Dead to mix it up. Learning to touch type takes time and practice. You weren't birthed being able to type 60-70 wpm with unorthodox form. It'll take time to build up proper form; you'll probably start 30ish wpm, and if you spend time with proper form, you'll get back up to your old speed, and probably a little bit more. The second time you learn something, you usually do better. I relearned touch typing in a high school keyboarding class, which was 5 days a week for not quite an hour. On some old school black and white macs, using ancient software etc. Put a file folder with one side under the keyboard, and the other side over your hands so you don't peak (fold at the back of the keyboard, in case that wasn't obvious :). +1 on not looking at the keyboard. It was hard for me so I went a bit further and learned to touch type Dvorak instead. I practiced on https://learn.dvorak.nl for a few months, and tried using Dvorak for low stakes/low speed typing. After 6 months I went to using Dvorak full time. My typing speed is actually the same/slightly better, but it's so much better for writing/coding as I don't interrupt my train of thought by looking at the keyboard. Practice and time. I haven't learned to touch type using some course or tutorial, and I there may be some out there that will get you up to speed even faster than learning it on your own. I remember as a child not looking at the keyboard and thinking "I want to type the letter x", then using a finger and checking on the screen if I hit the right key. Crude, finger-greased approach. As I said, there may be some guides on how to do it properly that, with practice and time, will lead to better results faster. Agreed. I took a typing class in high school back in the 90s and felt so inferior to my peers who could do 75WPM... I never got it right back then. It wasn't until I just completely forgot about all the rules and started writing regularly on keyboards that I improved. To this day I still mis-spell things and look at my fingers, but I type just as well as anyone else in IT, and probably get paid better than most in stenography jobs... And then spell check was invented, which fixed a lot of my problems (although it's been wonky a lot lately for reasons unknown) Just goes to show that the emphasis on learning a skill that may be valued at one point in time probably won't ultimately be what you need to develop fully in the long run. I still look at my fingers when I play guitar as well, and I have pretty fat fingers. A guy at a guitar shop told me I'd never be able to play guitar as a pro long ago when I was just a kid, but that made me work harder at it. Many people who have made hit songs look at their fingers too, even Prince... You can tell if you watch enough YouTube live performances. Rules on how to improve are usually just guide lines, not laws... Practice, dedication, necessity, native talent, and time spent on developing a skill are what really drive achievement. Developing a sense on what works best for your particular talents and being able to pivot to new things until you find your "success niche", is a big key to finding life-long success in my opinion. All the best to you, winternett. You shouldn't care about cranking out 100 wpm. You just want the text to flow without expending much mental and physical effort. I am typing this final paragraph using hunt-peck style, while looking at the keyboard. It is horrible, feels like going back to the stone age with no electricity or plumbing. Can confirm 1000% touch typing is far superior. It sounds like touch typing is reducing your speed because you don't know how to touch type. Keep at it. Thanks I'm not trying to be an ass; everyone you know had to go thru the same thing. That Unix greybeard wizard who types 900 wpm and knows every EMACS command? They were once in your exact position. Seconded. Touch typing is a skill that can only be aquired by, well, touch typing. If you practice, you'll get there, but you do have to practice, and you do have to let yourself forgive the mistakes (just go back and fix them, then carry on). But resist the temptation to return to hunt-and-pecking or to watching your fingers as you type. Your eyes should be looking where the characters appear on screen as you type, not looking at your fingers. Thirded, and just wanted to say that it requires maintenance, too. I quit programming professionally and use the computer quite infrequently compared to before--my WPM dropped 20-30, from ~110 to ~80-90. 80 isn't a bad number, but touch-typing is definitely a muscle memory skill that needs exercised.