I have been a horrible typist my whole life. Unlike my parents, I grew up at a time when typewriters were being phased out, but computers were not yet omnipresent. This meant schools had already stopped teaching touch typing—a skill often offered only to girls, as traditional, sexist society assumed they would become secretaries or assistants. At the same time, nobody (yet) thought about teaching touch typing on computer keyboards. Who knows why.
Over the years, my typing style evolved from traditional pecking to a crooked finger gymnastics routine, with decent muscle memory of the QWERTY layout. It was bad. Horrible. I’m not sure my right pinky has seen any decent action in decades.
So here I am, past my prime, at the age of forty, learning to touch type.
There are a few reasons behind this decision.
First, I built myself a keyboard from scratch, complete with complex soldering. I’m proud of my clicky, plastic-fantastic Lily58 Ortholinear Split keyboard. The motivation is simple: I want to actually use what I built.
Second, I think it’s a fantastic mental exercise. We often use the term “muscle memory,” but it isn’t actually stored in the muscles. From my rudimentary research, muscle memory is a form of procedural memory stored in the brain—specifically in the basal ganglia and cerebellum, regions involved in movement and coordination. This is where the age factor comes in. While I’m perfectly healthy today, the risk of dementia increases with age. Mental exercises like learning new skills, doing puzzles, or solving crosswords can slow mental deterioration later in life.
Lastly, the muscle memory of efficient typing helps free up the conscious mind for other tasks, such as programming.
I’ve taken a rather extra-hard approach to learning. I’m learning touch typing on a new layout (QWERTY but ortholinear) using a quirky split keyboard with fancy layers. So, I definitely tick the mental gymnastics box fair and square.
I’m over a month in and already at 60 words per minute. More importantly, my accuracy is consistently improving.
It’s still not fast enough for work, but daily 30-minute practice sessions are paying off. I can’t wait to switch to my new keyboard as my daily driver with full touch-typing proficiency.
Resources and tools I recommend for those looking to learn touch typing:
- Start by hardcoding ngrams. I found Ngram Type really useful for that.
- Learn progressively if you can. The keybr.com supports adding more characters to training data as you improve.
- Once you’re comfortable, head to MonkeyType and clock in consistent training hours. Anecdotal evidence suggests you’ll need around 50 hours of practice to gain decent speed and confidence.
Happy typing!
