Learning How to Type 5

[jerry1423]

I am sixty years old and never learned how to type properly.
I am still just a pecker.
Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to learn to type ?



Jerry J.
UGV5-NX1899

 

[looslib]

Take a typing class.
I have used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on my PC.

I have done both and still am a hunt and peck typist at 72!
I took the typing class when I was about 13 and used the PC training when I was in my 40's.
I have owned a PC, Apple IIe in 1982 and switched to compatibles in the late 80's.

"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[JohnRBaker]

I took one typing class back in high school. This was in 1965 and most of the typewriters in the class were manual. However, when I got to college I had to type my term-papers for class and I had to write FORTRAN programs using a keypunch machine. And then in my job we eventually got a CAD/CAM system which I used every day. It was like 15 years after I had graduated I was at a high school reunion and my old typing teacher was there, and I could honestly tell him that of all the classes in high school, his was the only one where what I learned I now used everyday.

I know that's not relevant to your question, but it's still a good story ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[JohnRBaker]

But this is something that is relevant, at least tangentially. When we did get our first CAD/CAM system at work, this was in the late 70's, after a couple of us graduate engineers had been trained to use it and we started to mainstream it into our daily work we decided to train a couple of our better, albeit, non-graduate designers. This one guy was a our best piping designer and when we tried to get him to use the system, the first day we had him in a class he told us that he would never be able to use the system because the letters on the keyboard weren't in order. After all, how was he expected to use a key board where the first row of letters were 'Q, W, E, R, T, Y; and not 'A, B, C, D, E, F'? It turns out that that was the first time he'd ever sat in front of a keyboard.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[TigerGuy]

I heard once that the standard QWERTY keyboard design was to slow down typists. The early typewriters would jam, because the typists were so fast on a keyboard laid out alphabetically.

https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder...ginally laid,QWERTY keyboard layout was born!

I could never type on an alphabetic layout, after typing on QWERTY for 40 years after my first typing class.

 

[MintJulep]

It's just about practice practice practice to build muscle memory.

Searching google for 'typing teacher online free' finds many choice to look at and try.

 

[zeusfaber]

Finding where all the commonly-used keys on a keyboard live is simply down to practice: Going for them with more than two fingers involves breaking some old habits.

Try teaching yourself to play a woodwind instrument for a short while. It needn't be an expensive one: A treble (called alto in some parts of the world) recorder will do - anything smaller is unfair on the rest of the household. You don't need to keep it up for long, or even get particularly good at playing it. All you need to achieve is to wire-in the idea that each of your fingers is entitled to its own share of the work.

A.

 

[Stick.]

Unless you want to take a formal typing class, Youtube University is probably a good start. This playlist looks decent, although I haven't watched much of it to verify that. After that, a program (or probably web app these days) that allows you to practice typing and provides instant feedback is a good tool. Mavis Bean Teaches Typing used to be the common one, I'm not sure what's the best these days. I'd look for something that doesn't just throw random words at you, but instead has more focused lessons to work on specific things (something like working on left hand home row words, then right hand home row, then both hands home row words, etc). Beyond that, it's mostly just practice, with a commitment to practicing good technique. At some point you should make sure to practice typing without looking at the keyboard, but I don't know when it makes sense to do that (right from the get go vs later on). When I took a typing class in school, they used to hold a piece of cardboard over our hands when we took a test to make sure we couldn't look down and cheat.

 

[Apple234]

Most importantly I would get a keyboard cover.

 

[drawoh]

TigerGuy,

There is an article by Stephen Jay Gould about typewriters. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, they held a typing speed competition, and it was won by a man with a QWERTY typewriter. He had been trained by a lady had worked out that you needed to type in time to music. If you establish a good rhythm, you don't jam typewriter keys.

I took typing in high school, and they had us typing to music on our manual typewriters. I still have a manual typewriter, and all I can do with it is hunt and peck. Forty years of computers have completely destroyed my rhythm.

I have no idea of how they teach typing now.

--
JHG

 

[TigerGuy]

I was taught by placing the 8 fingers on the "home" keys: a,s,d,f, j,k,l,;

Our teacher would call out a letter and we would have to hit it without looking. I can type the alphabet, but never could grasp using the numbers at the top of the keyboard.

 

[geesaman.d]

I agree to take a typing class but above all stop looking at the keyboard. Keep your index fingers on the f and j keys (they should have a pip you can feel) and the other fingers on the adjacent keys. I'm a visual thinker so after doing the drills to learn where each key is from that home position, there was a time when I had to pause and think about where the next letter was instead of looking down at it. But before long I developed sufficient muscle memory.

I learned in 7th or 8th grade, there was a typing class that carried on the tradition of teaching administrative skills but fortunately by then it wasn't just the class for future secretaries. It wasn't mandatory but my Mom pushed hard for me to take it and boy was that ever the right call. I'm not sure I'd have ever learned properly otherwise.

Funny thing that muscle memory - the kind of typing I do in daily life is what I'm best at. If someone plops down a typing speed test and they don't write or format the way I normally do, I make a ton of mistakes and slow down. But if I'm typing my own thoughts I can usually prattle on at a good pace. So keep that in mind as you learn - it will be slower to type exercises than your own thoughts but that will soon enough be another speed boost in your daily activities.

 

[SandCounter]

You have to have a motivation to type fast. I took years of typing in elementary and high school in the 80's and 90's and was always more comfortable hunting and pecking. When I went to college, AOL instant messenger came out. I could not keep up with the conversations. So, I forced myself to put my fingers on the home keys and reach keys with the closest finger, and slowly but surely I caught on. Don't worry at first about getting every letter right. Go back and edit at the end of the paragraph.

There is a great website out there where you race cars against other people; the speed is determined by your typing speed. My kids play, it's great practice.

 

[Woun1998]

I'm pretty good at blind and fast typing, but I still need to watch how I type sometimes, it's a strange feeling when you look at the screen and the visual image of the keyboard and the key placement disappears ... and only mechanical memory helps. That's why, in my experience, typing courses are a great thing, I personally don't use them for a long time, only sometimes I spend half an hour on training

 

[Compositepro]

I've never taken a typing class and use hunt and peck. I do know that getting and staying fast at typing takes lots of practice. When I type I use one finger. If I've had to type much, I get significantly faster within hours and after a while will start using two fingers. And I don't have to look at the keyboard much. I do not type often enough to make training worth while. That's same issue I have with CAD. I will never use it enough to make it worth while to learn. What I found shocking is how difficult it is for me now to even do a mechanical drawing with paper and pencil. I get by with free hand drawing on graph paper. It sucks to get old.

 

[ohiocad]

As stated above, motivation drives a lot of it. I don't by any means type "correctly", but CAN type reasonably quickly. When I first started typing, online access was a dial-up modem, and ISP's charged by minutes connected. That was a lot of motivation there, and it got quite expensive if I was typing hunt-and-peck one letter at a time.

Also, there were a couple "learn to type" games. That was also back in the DOS days, so I'm guessing they've come a long way since. But, that made it more interesting than just following along and typing boring sentences over and over. The one I remember best (and probably helped me the most) was a knock-off of Centipede, where it was letters for the segments, and you had to type in order. Getting progressively more complicated and faster made it much more complex as it went along. Being an old-school arcade fan, that helped a lot. YMMV on that one.

Last item I'll throw out there, (I didn't see it mentioned above) the keyboard itself. I am HORRIBLE on a laptop keyboard. The more tactile the response, the better I am with it. My best results to this day still come from using an old (AT plug, if that tells you anything) IBM "clicker" keyboard. Drives others in the office nuts when I did it out of the cobwebs, and takes about 3 adapter connectors in a chain to get it to work, but gives me the best results.
Ergonomics and everything else can play in to it as well, but find a keyboard that you're comfortable with. As I stated, for me, that is NOT a laptop. Flat keyboards just make it so much tougher IMO.

 

[JohnRBaker]

I have a MacBook M1 Pro, but when at home, which is about 90% of the time, I use an external, full size keyboard hooked to a 'brick' where all of my peripherals are connected, like external drives, scanners, DVD/CD drive, monitor, webcam, etc. . Now it's an Apple keyboard so no 'clicking', but the keys move enough to give you the tactile feedback needed. Of course, when we're on the road, we have to make due with the laptop keyboard, which is OK, just not as nice as the full-sized external keyboard.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[debodine]

In the 1970's when I attended junior high, my dad insisted I take a typing class. Turns out that the typing class I took for typewriters (my dad envisioned me typing papers for college classes) has served me extremely well throughout my career with computers...thanks Dad!

I thought a bit of humor might brighten your day, based on what my mom asked me when she watched me type as I was just getting started. She asked me, "Son, which typing system do you plan to use - Hunt, Peck and Cuss, or the Columbus System (discover one and land on it)?"

 

[drawoh]

debodine,

I never heard any good keyboard jokes. Otherwise, my experience is similar to yours.

Back in the 1990s, I was trained as a UNIX system administrator. I had to learn the [tt]vi[/tt] text editor, the basic, idiot level of UNIX text management. [tt]vi[/tt] can be charitably described as user-hostile, however, if you are a touch typist and you have learned the damn thing, you can be incredibly productive. With your fingers on the home row, you can easily access the cursor keys. The forward slash is your text search, allowing you to index around huge documents with lifting your fingers. There are all sorts of nicer text editors in GNU/Linux, but I don't use them.

--
JHG

 

[debodine]

drawoh, I have zero Unix experience with which to compare. I really like the "...charitably described as user-hostile..." phrase. I remember thinking similar thoughts when I first learned Edlin, the very early MS-DOS editor...though I never put those thoughts into words as eloquently as you did!