Touch typing learning software
Hey Tildes, I learned to touch type with ye olde Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing CD-ROM that came with my first home computer (I'm not quite THAT old -- what was what we could afford).
Can you recommend a better / newer / snazzier / rizzier typing program for a teen / child?
Online or offline are fine, paid is fine. What do you like about it and what didn't you like about it?
Edit: Side note: how did y'all learn to type? Anyone here doesn't touch type (eg, not using your eyes) and use some other kind of keyboard configure or other tech? For Cantonese Chinese language, more young people are starting to use alternative methods even beyond the numpad Q9 and go straight to "speech to text" using their phone software. Curious about your languages and input.
My daughter has been learning with typing.com and nitrotype.com (with adblock). The gamification on either seems to help rather than be harmful.
There was a 'what FOSS need do you have' and you've reminded me that a major one is "quality edutainment titles for PCs which are non-explotitive and ideally offline"
So many do the really nasty "get hooked on freebie so kids beg parents to pay $100/yr for a crappy Pokemon ripoff with basic math problems"
The Textcorist is a great commercial title, but hardly appropriate for 1st/2nd graders.
Yeah, it sucks. I pretty carefully police what she does online. I generally say no to anything that requires an ongoing subscription, unless it's educational. DuoLingo is an example of something I would have considered paying for, but she didn't really stick with it after a few weeks. I also won't let her have an app that has ads. I'll okay a one-time price to get an Ad-free version, but it's pretty difficult to find that kind of app these days.
Not a typing thing, but on the game front, Stardew Valley has been a nice find. It's something we can do on our phones (now even with local co-op), it has a rich and interesting story, fun gameplay, and it's a pretty cheap one-time cost.
We're having a blast with renshuu learning app for Japanese. No ads, good content, cute mascot, good audio recordings.
I wish there was a good one for learning Cantonese. The several I've tried had some pretty severe shortcomings (simplified text; "lazy sound" pronunciation; unskipable ads galore)
Stardew also has remote multiplayer now which is great for keeping in touch. A chill game that lets you focus on conversation more than gameplay.
Not out of the box on mobile. There's a hidden but luckily simple step you need to do to enable it.
Here's how:
Open Stardew Valley.
Tap the leaves in the following order: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← →).
Tap the ? icon in the lower-right corner. If successful, co-op appears when you launch the game.
On mobile, it's LAN only (thinking about solutions for this, but many irons in the fire). But yeah, it's a lot of fun to collab.
As in you need to be on the same local network to play the game on mobile? Might be worth running a zerotier network (decent free tier). I used to use this tons for LAN on WAN gaming when I had friends and free time.
Yes, that is what is required. I'll have to look into the zero tier thing. It might be a way for my daughter to play with her friend when they are not together.
Seconding typing.com. I've taught both 7th graders and 3rd graders typing classes in a US public school and this is what I used. It's pre-planned gamified curriculum with a good logical progression from home row to the rest of the keys etc. Very easy to have them open the site and just work for a while. It also has a set of highly customizable games they can use to practice what they learned in the lessons, including a zombie defense game, a space shmup, a couple carnival games, and more. There are tests too, either timed or a certain amount of words. They can choose to do exercises that target their "problem keys" if need be. I liked that these tests and a lot of the lessons had the kids typing informational text, things you might learn in other classrooms like social studies or ELA, rather than just gibberish (though it does start with gibberish until they learn enough keys to write full words).
Additionally, there's a bunch of stats panels you can access as a teacher so you can track your kid's activity and see their progress. It requires a separate account that's registered as a teacher and the kid has to join a class you create. Some stats are visible from the student side too though.
Definitely use adblock. Not the most intrusive ads I've ever seen but more than enough to distract a kid (and ads are a plague anyway, but I digress lol). Though if you feel there's enough value in the platform and the premium features sound good, you can pay to remove the ads. I wish I could tell you what the premium features were but my school didn't have a subscription so I don't remember.
For a teen, The Textorcist is a great way to enhance typing speed, although it's not going to instruct touch typing on its own.
EpiStory is another great typing game, but it assumes you can already type fairly fast to play
I also have fond memories of playing Sega's Typing Of the Dead. The visual juxtaposition of demons and gore on screen with the stuffy, suited agents carrying backpacks of typing keyboards still makes me giggle
Textorcist looks awesome, thanks for recommending!
Edit: today I learned Sega also released typing of the dead kids mode, with no gore and the zombies / demons hold up spatulas and sports rackets lol so silly
The Typing of The Dead: Overkill is actually on Steam for PC.
And a new roguelike typing game that looks great is Glyphica: Typing Survival. I've seen a few streamers play it, and it looks genuinely fun, even for advanced typers.
Glyphica looks beautiful!
And a "maybe" for "TotD: Overkill" - was hoping for "kids" port so I can hit monsters holding giant leeks :) and learn some japanese vocabulary while we're at it. Emulation ahoy!
Aah, someone else who played the Typing of the Dead! That was one of my favourite gag games way back in the day; I was much more easily amused at the time, but the absurd phrases I'd need to type to e.g. blow up a zombie giant were enthralling.
I wasn't a huge fan of Overkill, but the original was 👌 I also adored Epistory, but I had trouble getting into its spiritual successor Nanotale. It looks like the developer put one more typing game out in 2022, but they've been silent since then ... hopefully they'll publish some more typing games eventually?
(thank you for bringing that up; memories of TotD really brought a smile to my face)
I'm so glad you also remembered I fondly :)
"I was much more easily amused at the time"
Yeah....that's right ..... * Comb mustache and monocle * and we're grown ups now....yes ... Tehehehee silly phrases
I was, and still am, one of those kids who just isn't any good at games despite loving to play games. Arcade games are expensive when one has basically no allowance (I bargained up to $1/day while working summer's for my dad), and this was one of the only ones I can even manage to play a little bit.
The flying small demon things sucked because I have poor hand eye coordination. But yeah this is one of the many joys of having a kid: being able to replay some old favourites and visit new versions, and even though I don't have time to play I can look over their shoulder and live vicariously through their playing.
:D hopefully we'll improve enough together to play through EpiStory and other games of the now quite prolific genre
My typing teaching program was Team Fortress 2 in High School. I tried some typing programs before that, but never got that far (in retrospect, ADHD for sure). But in TF2, to communicate over text chat, I needed to learn, so I just did it and slowly got better. From there, it was mostly writing essays in school and programming. I have never really learned well if I try to "learn" something explicitly. I learn as a side effect of me doing things that I find interesting. So as I do things I like more, I learn the things needed to make it easier for me to do things. My mental math throughout most of school was terrible, since I was trying to learn it explicitly (that is what was expected of me). In high school and college, when I was learning discrete math, calculus, statistics, etc, I got significantly better at my mental math simply because I was doing math more.
This but Brood War.
You are going to learn to talk shit, and you are going to learn to do it quickly.
I've used a few typing sites, but have settled on https://monkeytype.com/ , with which I am very satisfied. Minimal superficially, but actually quite rich and featureful if you dig deeper. Supports many languages and word sets. Per your original post, it isn't going to teach touch typing explicitly, or bring the user through a formal programme; but for simply letting you do a quick typing exercise when you have some free time, and tracking your stats and progress, it's great. It's also open source, and has no sign-up fee.
I don't need it for English; I use it to practice typing Korean.
The only knock against it that I see is that it only drills you on random words, rather than full, proper sentences, which I think are important for really learning to type in a language.Update: Oh, I just learned that there's a custom mode where you can paste in anything you want, and practice typing with it.Wow, monkeytype is great! I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it feels better than the others. Something to do with the font or the way the cursor and colors respond to keypresses? My first run-through gave me 115wpm, which is faster than I've had reported on https://keyhero.com/ in a long time. I poked through the options and enabled "plus-two" mode, where only the current and next two words are shown. 124wpm, which I'm sure is the highest anything's ever reported to me.
The default word pool seems to contain only very common words - this might be why things seem to flow better. I tried "quote" mode and I'm getting results around 100wpm, much more similar to the results I see for quotes on keyhero.
I tried some of the funbox modes - there are some silly ones, but also some genuinely useful ones.
"plus two" and the other "plus n" modes really help me focus. I consistently get higher scores with these enabled.
"pseudolang" is wild. Throws off all your muscle memory but still lets you practice ngrams. I like it.
"read ahead" is hard. Sort of opposite to "plus two", it hides the current and next few words, so you have to read ahead and remember them. I can just about do "read ahead hard", but at the line break I'm thrown off completely.
"weakspot" seemed like it would be useful, focusing on your frequent mistakes, but in practice it just feels like it will give me an RSI with so many repeated words.
"layoutfluid" would be great if I needed to practice multiple layouts. It switches the active layout on an interval while you're typing, forcing you to use both.
Zork, or other similar text only games....MUDs even better since typing speed and accuracy becomes a matter of [character] life and death.
I used keybr.com when I switched to Dvorak layout. keyhero.com is great for general practice on longer text. Not sure I'd call either of those rizzier though, very functional but not too gamified compared to some of the others.
Oh nice I've wanted to try Dvorak for a long time. Did you switch completely? Do you find QWERTY a pain when you are forced to interact with it?
I have lost the ability to touch type with Qwerty, I just don't use it often enough to retain it. If I made a point to use it an hour now and then I'm sure it wouldn't a problem to keep both. But I actively avoid Qwerty because it hurts my wrist, so I don't care much that I have to look on the rare occasions I use someone else's keyboard.
I'd guess it took a month or so of Dvorak to reach my prior Qwerty speed, and not much longer to surpass it. I type about 100wpm now, I think I peaked somewhere around 115, but I don't really have time or interest to practice for speed anymore. 100 is sufficient. IIRC I was like 60 or so on Qwerty beforehand. I switched in college so used papers as typing practice. I switched cold-turkey, and the first week or so was tough. I remember being stressed about a deadline for some assignment and wanting to switch back to Qwerty to work faster... I'm glad I didn't. Things got much easier very quickly after the first week.
Honestly the
hardestmost frustrating part as a power user was keyboard shortcuts. If you have the muscle-memory (as I did) to press Ctrl+[that one key] you'll have a bad time. Pressing a combination, expecting one action, and getting something different is no good. For example Ctrl+X (cut) becomes Ctrl+Q (quit/close in most applications). Sometimes you can lean into the mnemonics, but other times... Ctrl+[C]opy, Ctrl+[V]aste. At some point it clicked for me, though, and you can carry the shortcuts with you into any layout.Videogame keymaps are also a pain, especially multiplayer games with a chat. Fortunately all the games I play that have chat also have remappable inputs, and the ones that don't have remappable keys also don't have chat... If you are unfortunate enough to play something where this doesn't work, maybe do keep practicing Qwerty.
A tip, regardless of what layout you choose: accuracy and "rolling" are more important than speed. You build up muscle memory on common ngrams and type those faster. Frequent mistakes interrupt you and prevent building that muscle memory, so train for accuracy early. Speed will come naturally with normal use.
I switched to Dvorak for a while (about a year) in the early 2000s, and then regretted it and reverted. I find the increase in speed to be not particularly useful, and did not notice a real increase in accuracy, mostly because I don't have an issue typing accurately on most decent physical keyboards (but swipe typing on a phone like this comment? Watch out for nonsense!).
I switched back because going against defaults is generally difficult. I needed to retain typing with qwerty for any public computer, and at the time I worked desktop support at a university so there were a lot of public computer interactions. Then smart phones came out, and it was once again vaguely troublesome. Then I worked at as place where the CTO hated it.
In the end I think it's kind of a betamax vs VHS sort of argument. Dvorak is clearly better; qwerty has clearly "won". If you don't ever have to interact with qwerty then switching might make sense, but otherwise it doesn't.
Are I you?
dvorak actually confused the shit out of me when I was learning because I naturally confuse my two hands, and dvorak layout's insistence on home row and symmetrical hand position fucked me so bad. I mentioned in another comment that I don't use home row, but it's more than that; using home row is actively harmful to me because I make right-finger-right-position-wrong-hand mistakes, which are not possible in my chaotic asymmetric typing in qwerty.
Definitely a 'me' problem and not a keyboard layout problem, but I don't think it's 100% that dvorak is clearly better for every single person, for me it was a lot worse specifically because it's well designed haha
(Long-time Dvorak user here.) 1) It's better; 2) it's not really worth it; 3) it doesn't help on phones and tablets.
I can still type on QWERTY, but not at the speed I used to.
I typed in both qwerty and dvorak for a while and got up to 50 wpm on dvorak within a month or so (I type over 100 wpm in qwerty for comparison). Windows makes it pretty easy to switch keyboard layouts so I swapped back to qwerty whenever I needed, which turned out to be more often than not.
Dvorak felt better and was a lot smoother but I used a lot of hot keys for apps at work like Visual Studio, Maya, Photoshop, Unity, and then there's all the games. It wasn't worth it to me to have to remap hot keys, not to mention all the hot keys I gradually learned from others. I'm not even sure if some can be remapped since the entire team used them in the projects we were working in.
But it was fun to pop out all my keyboard keys and rearrange them to dvorak. My friends and coworkers got a kick of of it.
Being left-handed gives a sort of positive bias in this respect. Those Ctrl-ZXVC "shortcuts" are only short for people that mouse with the right hand. For left handers, you don't benefit because you have to take your hand off the mouse (or trackpad). If I am mousing at the same time, I use the left-hander-friendly shortcuts: Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Delete, Shift-Insert (otherwise, if I'm typing with both hands, I just use the ZXVC ones).
I guess the difficulty with key chords is harder for some than others. I [eventualy] used emacs and vim with Dvorak without too much ramp up, plus the standard ZXVC in other apps, etc. I guess I have them mapped with the letters in my head, not the hand positions?
How do you kids make those disapproving faces using only text? I want to put one of those thingies in here, but technology is difficult for me at my very advanced age. /joke
Something like 10FastFingers is great once you've gotten some of the concepts down, but something like How To Type can give people a visual representation of what their hands are supposed to be doing, and the exercises that accompany each of the hand positions are actually pretty useful for learning what your hand is doing at each of the positions. I would recommend starting with that and then once comfortable moving on to something gamefied.
I'll keep that in my back pocket for when we have a bit more speed :)
Also, emojis can never match the disapproval of ಠ_ಠ
Also also, "advanced age" is my trigger phase to post this clip
I identify heavily with the grandpas (despite not having yet earned that title). Chasing kids of their lawn, doing some gardening, playing Go; they're just living my best life.
(┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻
>:(
My very first introduction to typing was Mario Teaches Typing. I learned absolutely nothing because I was too young and was more interested in making Mario run across the screen than learning. I mostly just hunt/pecked my way through the first few levels.
My proper typing education came in highschool and I hated every minute of it, to be honest. I would get so frustrated with my computer teacher because she insisted on covering our hands with the cardboard boxes with the bottom and front cut out (so we could fit our hands in there, but couldn't see them). I don't even remember what the curriculum used was, I just remember the damn cardboard boxes.
It was frustrating at the time, but it was actually a very effective way to learn touch typing for me.
edit -- Also if you're in need of a distraction-free approach, see if you can find an AlphaSmart on ebay. I bought one to help me write distraction-free, and while it doesn't get much use, it's a neat little piece of tech that I could see being very useful for learning to type.
I learned on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in elementary. Also, my mom made me practice at home from a book on a typewriter. I was not allowed to use the corrective tape. By end of elementary, I was doing around 50 - 60 wpm. Then I discovered Yahoo chat rooms, then MUDs and then Starcraft Brood War, where if I was going to say anything in a competitive realtime game, I was going to say it fast (I am female and was hypercompetitive because ppl used to think girls were bad at computer games). That got me to around 120 wpm by the time I was in college. 120 wpm with hunt-and-peck numbers and symbols... when I started programming in my mid 20s, I got a completely blank das keyboard to force myself to learn numbers and symbols. I'm approaching 40 now and my accuracy is still low with them :3
Corrective tape!! There's an obsolete item I hadn't thought about for many a years. I mostly remember them from the game BioHazard, where the player can only save as many times as they have tape, when they find a typewriter at various locations.
I'm using typing.com since I never learned home row (the mental ruts I have are INSANE, I catch my fingers doing stupid stuff all the time), but if you already know your key positions and want to work on speed, something like 10fastfingers or keybr will be more appropriate.
oooh that looks excellent even/esp for kids okay gonna check that out.
curious about some of your homebrew keyboard acrobatics :)
Ha, love the phrase homebrew keyboard acrobatics! So my brain settled on using the middle finger of my left hand, and the index and middle finger of my right hand. Somehow I can easily hit 80-90wpm on an average day with these three fingers.
It's a bit lopsided, so my left hand is used to racing around the keyboard and must have a bunch of different algorithms for which keys it will pick up from the right hand (the right hand has never tried to help the left). Unless I am 100% focused and mindful of every stroke, I will catch my stupid left hand coming over and up, literally underneath my right hand, to steal a keypress for some unknown optimization. It is not helpful.
Using homerow, I have been stuck around 20-30wpm for a couple months. I sometimes feel like I drop into a flow state for a sentence or two, so I just need to keep at it and break through.
I learnt to touch type by getting a keyboard with unlabelled keys (specifically, the previous model of the Das Keyboard Ultimate).
I second that, OP – if you already have a keyboard with replaceable keycaps. You can buy a set of cheap blank keycaps from AliExpress/equivalent website; I got one for around €10, shipping included.
Getting a brand new keyboard just for that is probably an overkill.
Not to detract from the point that it's unnecessary, but I do have to defend it a bit.
It is easier to type faster on a good keyboard. Certainly not necessary, but more reliable and pleasant. For the build quality and all, Das is not a bad deal! But if you just want a good/decent mechanical keyboard, I can't recommend Das for the price. I have heard good things about Keychron's prebuilts, and they are priced much more reasonably, but I don't own one.
If someone is willing to pay a premium for better typing experience, then my recommendation is any keyboard with Topre switches; they are a different technology than the cherry-style switches that most "mechanical keyboards" use. Topres are all very expensive, though, so there really is a premium there. The best-feeling keyboard I own is a Leopold FC660C, however Leopold no longer makes new Topre keyboards due to some licensing drama. The Happy Hacking Keyboard is a classic, a friend of mine swears by theirs, but in my opinion HHKB is overpriced for what it is so I never got one for myself. Now that Leopold's are in finite supply, maybe their pricing doesn't seem so bad. There are other Topre vendors out there, certainly some of them have better pricing, but I only have personal experience with Leopold and HHKB.
seconding the suggestion for a more gamified option: https://zty.pe/
there was a version of this game on a flash game website back in the day, and it was one of the only game websites that wasnt filtered. a couple of friends and i would hop from game to game trying to beat eachothers highscores and i was ATROCIOUS at this one because you had to type and look at the screen at the same time.
i could get something like 30-40wpm if i was typing what someone was saying, or copying it from a page that i had underneath the keyboard. but i every time i looked up from the keyboard i would have to reorient myself and it would just kill my speed.
the main thing about touch typing is just constantly having a go. i still mess up a surprising amount when my fingers were one key off, or i was holding the laptop at a funny angle, or im typing on a new keyboard - but i never look down. i just hit backspace and try again, and it might feel silly to do it several times in a row (i can never remember which symbol is %,$, or £) but you'll be blazing through common words before you realise, and then you can practice in your day to day life as well
also, i do touchtype now, but one of my friends still doesnt and she's 24 now and works as a programmer. i'll admit that i just kinda assume everyone can touch type unless theyre not a particularly internet-y type of person. so it really surprised me that she was fiddling around with writing a gameboy emulator but couldnt really care less about learning to touch type beacuse its never been a negative impact. and the only reason i learnt was because i was losing in a video game.
Fun!! I love that this so small and quick and no logins nothing, just play. Really miss the good old days of flash games. Thanks!
Writing a fantasy story! I went from hunt and peck to fully touch typing over a couple months because I was writing 1-2k words a night for several months in middle school. We did Mavis Beacon in school but that wasn't helpful to me, particularly because my teacher kept seeing that I, gasp, wasn't using home row, and made me restart it over and over. I now type solidly over 100wpm and I still do not use home row.
I primarily voice compose on mobile these days, and I'm greatly looking forward to a day when that can be "purely"! I want to look into talon voice on my pc too, imo a mixture of voice typing and touch typing is overall better than only touch typing, even with a full keyboard
Ah, hm. I learned to type using a program on cassette tape that came with my dad's work computer. I don't really remember it very clearly, this one looks like a likely candidate. It also reminds me that I learned BASIC on that machine and came up with my very first programming philosophy: number the lines in hundreds.
Wow! Ancient technology! <--- what my kid says every time we talk about tech when we were kids :/
Numbering lines in hundreds because then you can add lines in between without having to renumber everything?
Got it in one :)
Just by doing mostly, I was a nerdy teenager in late 90s early 2000s. So I spend a lot of time behind the computer, and eventually you will pick it up regardless of you doing a course.
I don't do proper touch typing as I don't use the proper fingers and sometimes have to quickly look down to reorient where I ended up.
A few years ago I tried to learn touch typing “properly” and had a lot of trouble moving past my self learned habits. Doing a proper course can help, but whoever you are looking into this for also will just need to type a lot for it to become a habit. I know a lot of people who did touch typing courses when they were younger and before computers really took off. So they never really practiced their typing skills and had to relearn it when computers became ubiquitous.