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Comment by mh-cx | Hacker News Reader

I can only tell how we were taught 10 finger typing, some 30 years ago:

Don't aim for speed! Aim for typing without errors and - more importantly - a constant rhythm. Music helps. Start extremely slow and spell out each word letter by letter in your mind.

You should find many exercises out there for how to get started with all fingers. But the key is really to slow things down. It's very much like learning an instrument.

If you keep practicing this say 10-20 minutes per day you'll soon see progress. Speed then comes very naturally and without much effort.

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I agree with the part about aiming for accuracy instead of speed. But I disagree with the constant rhythm thing. Maintaining a constant rhythm will slow you down, as there are always words or letter combinations which are slower to type. Thus, if you strive to maintain a constant rhythm, you have to adjust your rhythm to the slower parts, which means it will slow you down for the faster parts.

I disagree. That's exactly the point: If you practice to achieve a constant typing rate (and start slow!) there will be no hard combinations anymore.

In fact it's exactly because of these "hard combinations" why your overall speed is slow, because you can't keep the high pace of the rest. So you have to master them first.

It's pretty much the same if you e.g. learn guitar: If you play a scale of notes you want to play it nice and smooth and not suddenly slow down at the hard part. If you can't play it smooth you're practicing to fast, so slow down until you mastered it.

But regardless of how much you practice, not all key combinations can physically be performed at the same speed, because some keys are easier to reach than others. So again, either you adjust all your typing to a constant rhythm and waste speed potential on the faster combinations, or you just accept variable speeds.

The comparison with musical instruments doesn't make that much sense because in music, the constant rhythm is required to stay in time. This requirement doesn't exist in typing.

Being more rhythmic will help if you frequently interchagne letter combinations that are faster to type. Or if you type on a typewriter it helps prevent jamming the typebars together.

This is definitely the key point, I think. Accuracy begets velocity.

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