What is the best way to learn typing?

[Austin Powers]

There's no shortcuts in life. I start hunting the legends on the key when I was 7 if I remember correctly. Try to use capital letters and punctuation points when talking to friends in MMOs or in comments box. I still can feel the suffering during the old days when I learn to type. Once you get familiar with the keys, touch typing takes few weeks(for me) to get used to it.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Open up notepad and watch a movie, type everything that you see and "write the movie" - all details; lightning, character dialog, scene flow. Don't allow yourself to get stuck on the errors you feel that you make, keep typing like that for the entire movie without looking at either the document or your keyboard. You'll be fast as lightning within a week!

That's an interesting method, I might try that at some point to increase my speed and accuracy.

I personally just took a few online typing lessons, then just forced myself to type without looking at the keyboard until I didn't feel the need to look. After a while it becomes muscle memory.

[BenDreadful]

When I tried to learn how to touch type in the past with the help of games and races and w/e it didn't work out so well. Those things are based on improving your skill at touch typing, not teaching you anything. Others giving you advice to not look at the keyboard are really helpful, assuming that you know where they all are and not lose track of things.

 

The thing that helped me is Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It's a little software that you download (legally or illegally) and it runs you through all the steps. It teaches you to type, not just give you random text and time you.

 

It has a few really great features that help you a lot like an on-screen keyboard with proper key and hand placement which you can look at and see where the keys are and with which finger to press it, but it removes the action of you looking at your own keyboard and losing focus on what you're typing.

 

Some people recommend like half an hour a day, but I think you should type as long as you can or want. Just do it every day. At least 15mins.

 

And then go play online typing games and races if you want to improve your wpm.

[TheProfosist]

When I tried to learn how to touch type in the past with the help of games and races and w/e it didn't work out so well. Those things are based on improving your skill at touch typing, not teaching you anything. Others giving you advice to not look at the keyboard are really helpful, assuming that you know where they all are and not lose track of things.

 

Same for me with the games and races. As for not looking at the keyboard you just have to get used to where your hand should be for your typing style and if you get off move it back and be ready to correct lots of mistakes. For me though I couldnt force myself not to look until I was semi competent thats why I got caps that were super hard to read so it was faster to correct than to look down and check. 

[Torg73]

I found the best way to type was to learn the keyboard, as in know where everything is.  Am no touch types but because I can only use my left hand for typing I had to learn the keyboard and I started on computers like the ZE 81 and the Spectrum, that helped me later on when I started working on PC's.

 

My big problem is that I can't spell good and trying to get in a rhythm can be hard when you have to stop and think how to spell a word am typing.

 

Also if you what to learn touch typing then you need to get a keyboard that's comfortable for you, and practice even if your keyboard is not plugged in to anything.

[LOST TALE]

Start with all of your fingers. you dont have to type 7 letters a second. just use the closest finger to the letter. I think I got this from gaming too. since oyu dont use 2 fingers.. you use all of them, which ever is close.

 

but When I was super slow now shit I used my index.

[Prince32780]

Mavis Beacon