Beginning Touch Typing - The Proper Way

Can you touch type? You know, typing insanely fast without having to look at the keyboard and process where the keys are placed! What are your touch typing skills like, beginner, advanced, or maybe you’ve been trained professionally? Do you touch type the proper way (with all 10 fingers / thumbs in the correct position) or your own way? What’s your WPM / CPM speed and accuracy averages based on tests you’ve taken? Were you ever trained as a touch typist in school or in a business capacity? Or maybe you trained yourself with a software application like Mavis Beacon or TIPP10 (TIPP10 | Free Touch Typing Tutor | Open Source Software)?

I can. I don’t even know how I learned. Can’t all programmers touch type?

Use this test to find your WPM. Mine is 76 but I am determined to keep going until I catch my bf, who can do 84.

Edit: He is also a showoff and he will be reading this now just dying to post.

cough Congratulations! You made no mistakes, practice does make perfect. cough

How many mistakes did you make Hawk?

Showoff.

We did a tiny bit of touch typing at school as compulsory on typewriters but not nearly enough or for long enough for it to stick.

Bring back Mavis Beacon!

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note: Mavis is apparently back, compatible with Mac, and you can ‘like’ her on Facebook.
Practice your typing skills with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing

52, 3 mistakes… not bad in a foreign language…

Like Hawk, I learned it over the years, just typing away on my keyboard :slight_smile:

edit: 56, no errors… ok, back to work :smiley:

102 wpm, 146 mistakes - I ROCK!

:lol: Mike yes you do rock! :hangin:

I’m in or around 140wpm last time I checked - I did some typing lessons in school wayyy back on a really really old computer that looked sort of like this (no I’m not in my late 90’s - that school cheaped out on IT!) - we simply did “frfv, gtgb” etc on what looked like a DOS prompt screen for about an hour once a week! It helped somewhat but I learned most of it with Mavis Beacon and weirdly chatting online. Back in the chat room/IRC/IM-ing days it paid to be a fast typist so you could keep up with the flow of conversation! I think that’s where I got my speed from but I do have bad habits, if I tend to make a mistake (I’m only human) I always have to backspace and type it again, none of this fix it later stuff! :lol:

Me too.
And no, I don’t type the proper way, I use 6 fingers, and I use them as comes most easy at that time, so the same letter can be typed by different fingers in different situations :smiley:

I guess I can since I’m doing it when writing this post but I never really thought about it. Been using computer many hours per day since I was 11-12 years old at least so it comes naturally. Went to high school specialized on programming and spent 6 hours per weekday in front of a keyboard for three years there too, after which I went home and spent another 6 hours or so per day at my own computer. Maybe not healthy but hey, it’s what I do.

Not sure if I use the “proper” method, probably not since I don’t care what the proper method is. I just do what feels natural to me.

The test said:

Your speed was: 66wpm.
Congratulations! You made no mistakes, practice does make perfect.

And it’s a foreign language for me as well, some of the spelling was a bit annoying. Then again, I don’t live in my country anymore so I’m pretty used to English. :slight_smile:

I can’t touch type… my mum can and has an impressive wpm, but I don’t. I don’t think I use a method that has a name, more like ‘whatever finger is convenient to use at the time’ I think!

83wpm, 1 mistake. I find it harder to copy text than to type from my head though!

I assume you get bonus points for copy-and-paste text; as that is what it asks you, click start the clock, copy-and-paste the text into the bottom box, and then stop. :wink: :lol:

my results: 246 wpm, 0 errors :award:

[size=1]they said copy the sample text below, not type the sample text below

took me a few seconds to realize they had some kind of javascript or whatever to prevent straight copying, so i had to view source and grab it outta there[/size]

:smiley:

Copy has several meanings… one of which is typing it out again!

Smack bang on 80! No errors, though I did have to use the backspace a few times during the copying I must admit.

I learned to touch type when I was about… 8 or 9. I had family and friends living a long way away, so MSN Messenger got me started. A few hundred conversations later I was pretty much fluent.

When I started programming for the first time, at about 11, my speed picked up, until about 16 which was the peak of my programming years. Now university takes so much time away from me, I use a computer for at most 2 hours a day - some days not at all. If I could go back in time and tell my 16 year-old self that, I’d probably see a tear or two.

I think I’m going to attempt to learn Dvorak and (eventually) programmer’s dvorak. Given that it is my job, anything to make things easier is a bonus for me!

I thought he was a 19th century Czech composer of romantic and dramatic symphonies… !

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia