THE TYPELESSON LIBRARY
Typing guides
42 written guides to the questions the exercises do not answer: what a good typing speed actually is, which finger types which key, how long a test should run, why your speed stops improving, and whether switching keyboard layout is worth the weeks it costs. Free to read, no account, and honest about which of the numbers everyone quotes are worth anything.
Speed, and what it means
What the numbers measure, which of them are worth anything, how long a test should run, and why accuracy moves a result more than effort does.
Average typing speed
What the commonly quoted typing speeds are worth, where the famous 40 WPM figure came from, and how to find out where you actually stand.
What counts as a good typing speed
Good depends on what you type and how accurately. A guide to the bands, why accuracy beats speed, and what employers actually ask for.
WPM, CPM and KPH
Why a typing word is five characters, how to convert between WPM, CPM and keystrokes per hour, and what net WPM subtracts.
Typing accuracy
What an accuracy percentage really means, why an error costs more than one keystroke, and how to fix accuracy without simply slowing down forever.
Why your typing speed stopped improving
Nearly everyone stalls somewhere in the middle. What causes a typing plateau, why more of the same practice does not clear it, and what does.
How long a typing test should be
Fifteen seconds, one minute and five minutes measure three different things. Which length to use, and why comparing results across them is meaningless.
Learning the method
What touch typing actually is, how long it takes, and what changes it fastest.
What touch typing is
Touch typing means typing without looking, using all ten fingers from a fixed home position. What it is, why it works, and what it is not.
How to type faster
Six changes that raise typing speed, in the order worth making them. Most people's fastest gain is not typing faster — it is stopping mistakes.
How long learning to touch type takes
A few weeks to type without looking, a few months to be genuinely fast. What actually determines the timeline, and why frequency beats hours.
Typing posture
Most posture advice is furniture marketing. The parts that matter are wrist angle, elbow height, screen height and how often you stop.
Typing in a second script
If you already touch type, your hands transfer completely and your recall does not. What that gap feels like, why it closes, and how to shorten it.
Do typing games help, and what do they measure?
Games are a good diagnostic and a poor teacher. What pressure exposes that a calm test does not, and the limit of playing your way to a faster speed.
The keyboard itself
Each of the four rows, which finger owns which key, how to turn on a layout for the language you want, how to reach the characters that are not printed on the keys, and whether different hardware would help.
The home row
ASDF and JKL; are where every touch typist's hands return. What the home row is, why the bumps are there, and how to drill it properly.
Keyboard layouts
QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, AZERTY, QWERTZ and the non-Latin layouts — what each one changes, and whether switching is worth it.
The top row
Q through P sit one row up from home, and every key there is a reach and a return. Which fingers do what, and why E and R feel different.
The bottom row
Z X C V B N M sit below home and are the least practised keys on the board. Which finger takes which, and why C and B cause trouble.
The number row
Numbers and symbols sit two rows above home, and almost nobody drills them. Which finger takes which digit, and when to use the keypad instead.
Typing code
Code is symbol-dense, punctuation-heavy and hard on the little fingers. Why fast prose typists are often mediocre code typists, and what to drill.
Which finger types which key
The standard finger assignment for every key on a QWERTY keyboard, why the index fingers carry two columns each, and the keys people get wrong.
Typing accented letters and symbols
Dead keys, AltGr, Option, compose and the Unicode escape hatch: the five ways to type é, ñ, ü or ß, and which one is actually worth learning.
Does your keyboard matter?
Mechanical against membrane, laptop against desktop, split against straight. What genuinely changes your typing, what only changes how it feels.
Keyboard shortcuts worth learning
The text-editing shortcuts almost nobody learns are the ones that pay. What they are on each platform, how to learn them, and why they belong to typing.
Adding a keyboard layout
The step before any of this works: turning on the layout in your operating system, switching to it, and what to do about the wrong letters on your keycaps.
Scripts and their keyboards
One guide per writing system: which layout is standard, what it puts where, what transfers from the keyboard you already use, and what a keyboard chart can and cannot show you about it.
Hindi typing: InScript, Mangal and Kruti Dev
Two incompatible traditions, and one of them is not Devanagari at all. Which name is a font, which is a layout, and which one to learn.
Typing Cyrillic: one script, eight keyboards
Why the standard Russian layout ignores the letters on your keycaps, when a phonetic layout is defensible, and how far the eight Cyrillic layouts differ.
Typing the Arabic script: one alphabet, five keyboards
One script, five layouts. What Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish each change, why a letter changes shape after you type it, and which of it transfers.
Typing Vietnamese: Telex, VNI and the tone marks
Vietnamese needs more characters beyond a-z than any other Latin alphabet here, and no keyboard has keys for them. How Telex and VNI build them instead.
Typing Korean: Dubeolsik and the syllable block
Korean letters are typed in order and assembled into blocks as you go: which keys build a syllable, and why Dubeolsik alternates hands by construction.
Typing Japanese: romaji, kana and the conversion step
Japanese has no keyboard layout of its own. What you press to produce kana, why the conversion step is the real skill, and how the two input modes differ.
Typing Chinese: Pinyin, Zhuyin and the shape-based methods
No keyboard has a key per character, so the question is what you type instead. Four answers are in daily use, and they are genuinely different skills.
Typing Thai: four levels, and no spaces between words
Thai writes without spaces and needs more characters than one keyboard level holds. What that means for a typist, and what a keyboard chart can show.
Typing Turkish: two national layouts and two letter i's
Turkey has a keyboard designed for Turkish and almost nobody uses it. What the Q-keyboard adds to QWERTY, and why the dotless i catches everyone.
Typing Greek: a layout you can half-guess
Most of the Greek keyboard is where an English reader would put it. The six keys that are not, the two lowercase sigmas, and where the accents hide.
Typing Hebrew: five final letters and no vowels
Hebrew leaves its vowels out, changes five letters at the end of a word, and runs right to left except for its numbers. What each means at the keyboard.
Typing Amharic and Tigrinya: a syllable at a time
Ethiopic has a character for every consonant-and-vowel pair — far more than a keyboard has keys. How it is typed, and why no chart can show it.
InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts
India's standard keyboard is not one layout but a family. The same key gives the matching letter in Devanagari, Bengali, Telugu and five more.
Typing Tamil: the layout that did not join InScript
Every other Indian script here shares one arrangement. Tamil designed its own, and the reasons are about the language rather than about politics.
Typing Georgian and Armenian: two alphabets you can nearly guess
Two neighbouring scripts, each unrelated to anything around it, and two keyboards arranged by sound. How far that gets you, measured key by key.
Typing Burmese: Zawgyi, Unicode, and a decade of broken text
For ten years most Burmese online text was not Unicode, and looked like it was. What Zawgyi was, why it mattered, and what to type today.
Typing Khmer and Lao: the largest alphabet, and a simplified one
Khmer holds the record for the largest alphabet and Lao reformed its way to a small one. Two answers to one problem, and what each costs a typist.
Typing Sinhala: Wijesekara, and an alphabet in two halves
A typewriter layout from the 1950s, a script with no straight lines, and an alphabet where half the letters are for words borrowed from elsewhere.
How hard is each script to type? Every keyboard here, measured
Thirty-five keyboards, four things counted about each: how many keys they define, how much of the language they reach, and how large its character set is.
Or just start typing
The beginner course is nine stages from the home row outwards, the speed test is configurable, and both work in 86 languages without signing in.