Learn Touch Typing with Keybr.com

Touch typing is the ability to use muscle memory to find keys fast, without using the sense of sight, and with all the available fingers, just like piano players do. It significantly improves typing speed and eliminates errors. Touch typing simply makes you more productive and it is a skill worth learning. However, many people engage in the bad habit of ‘hunt-and-peck’ typing, even those seasoned professionals with years and decades of computer experience. It is easy to understand, though, as touch typing requires dedicated practice to learn it well. That is why we created Keybr.com, a free online typing tutorial, to give you the most advanced learning experience and let you develop your typing skills faster.

How does Keybr.com work?

There are several features in Keybr.com that set it apart from most of the typing practice software out there. In short, it employs statistics and smart algorithms to automatically generate typing lessons matching your skills. Lets discuss this in details.

First, it does not force you to repeat the same characters over and over again; that is simply slow, boring and contributes very little to your learning. For example, the words like ‘jjf jjk jdd …’ are just hard to read and will slow down noticeably even experienced typists.

Instead, Keybr.com generates random, but readable and pronounceable words using the phonetic rules of your native language. These words look almost natural, and often they really are. Typing sensible text is much easier than repeating random letters, and it helps you to remember frequent key combinations. The latest point is very important. For example, it's almost impossible for the letter ‘W’ to follow the ‘Z’ in English, and you will never type this combination in Keybr.com. Instead, you will type more common words, such as “the,” “that,” “with,” and so on. And soon you will learn how to type the “th” combo really fast.

Second, Keybr.com measures your keystroke dynamics and collects comprehensive typing statistics. For example, it measures your typing speed for each individual key, and uses this data to generate random words putting emphasis on the weakest key. The more troubles you have with a particular key, the more you will be typing it. It means, the generating algorithm will put that letter in every word in the next generated lesson. Your typing skills are re-evaluated after every completed lesson, and the next lesson will be adjusted accordingly.

Third, Keybr.com lets you introduce as few keys as possible to the lesson, adding more keys automatically when it decides that you are proficient at the current level. When you only start learning it generates lessons with words from a very small alphabet of the most frequent letters. When your typing speed for every key in that alphabet reaches certain threshold, the algorithm adds the next most frequent letter to the alphabet. And so on, until the next letter. This way you will learn the most frequent letters first, and the least frequent ones later.

Using Keybr.com

It's very simple. You just type the provided example text. Everything else is done automatically. However, at any time you can see your detailed statistics in the profile, or adjust lesson settings as you wish.

If you are not satisfied with your learning rate, or stuck at a particular letter, you can always increase the alphabet size or lesson length in the settings, so that you don't have to wait for the algorithm to include more letters to the generated words. You can also include capital letters and punctuation characters to the alphabet.

Last, but not least, if you are not satisfied by the automatic lessons, you can always switch to the manual mode and provide your own custom text to type out. You can even import a web site or blog into Keybr.com. To make the process simpler, we provide a bookmarklet.

Typing Tips

For maximal comfort and typing speed please follow these simple rules:

• Place your hands on the keyboard appropriately, so that your left forefinger is on the ‘F’ key, and the right one is on the ‘J’ key. You should feel the bump at the bottom of each of these keys.
• Group keys in zones and only use appropriate finger for each key. Use the illustration below to learn which finger is responsible for every key.
• Always return fingers to the initial position after each keystroke.
• Try not to look at the keyboard, but look at the screen only. If you are stuck, use the virtual keyboard to find the proper key.
• Please do not rush. First learn to type accurately, and only then improve your typing speed.

Remember, practice makes perfect, so do not give up early. For most people it takes at least several hours of practice to get to the decent speed. The optimal schedule is to study typing for 20-40 minutes daily. In a week you will see a difference.