Ask HN: Tips for learning how to type properly at a late age | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tips for learning how to type properly at a late age

1 pointthrow11384 comments

Hi HN!

I'm an engineer and I've always typed very poorly since I was young. My parents tried everything to get me to learn properly when it became apparent that I was predisposed to spending a lot of my life doing it, but it was already too late. I can still hear the lizard from Mavis Beacon eating the letters as I typed them.

Now that I'm getting a little older, my hands don't appreciate this very much. In particular my right index is objecting to having to smash the spacebar every word (yes, I'm that bad).

Does anyone have any tips on how to approach a transition to typing properly (or better) in ones mid-thirties please?

Thanks HN!

View on HN

I learned to touch type at a young age, using a book my grandmother used to teach herself:

https://www.etsy.com/market/gregg_typing_manual

Put your hands on asdf and jkl; and just start typing random combinations of those letters without looking until you know what letters/fingers to use. Then you gradually expand, first to g and h, then to nearby letters in the row above and below, then to numbers and symbols.

Some other tips:

- don't smash the keys; practice using as little force as necessary, because the impact at the bottom of the key travel is going to cause finger strain

- use right ring finger for the backspace by twisting your wrist slightly. Don't use pinky because you either have to stretch it or move your arm. I use left ring finger for tab for the same reason, although it's closer and pinky is not horrible

- don't worry about keeping all your fingers on the home row when reaching for numbers. It's better to move your hand a bit, for example, to press 1, rather than stretch your fingers. Or you can curl your fingers and move your hand up. If you feel your fingers stretching/straining, it will cause fatigue and/or carpal tunnel.

- you just have to commit to spending time to learn to touch type. You can start by using your thumb for the spacebar, not your right index finger!

Thank you mate, great stuff all around! :)

I am a Dvorak touchtypist, this was literally my first skill I developed during my study in university. I can predict that relearning from qwerty to Dvorak or Dvorak for programmers will be very painful for someone in his mid-thirties, but since you are going to train yourself with typing anyway, I recommend you to start from Dvorak and continue with qwerty if the pain will be really unbearable. There is nothing good in qwerty except of super handy placement of Cut, Copy, Past, Save and Select All operations - you know, a lot of people just have no requirements to typing setup other that handy copy-pasting.

Also you might consider to start some music playing for developing your fingers. For me playing vertical piano was kind of another step in mastering my keyboard skill because it involves all 10 fingers and vertical piano is significantly harder to press than grand piano or (especially) a synthesizer.

Your ring index issue looks very strange for me. I have noticed that nowadays nobody press a door bell button with ring finger anymore, probably because of smartphones.

add: If this is not obvious from my comment, I want this to be obvious: download any keyboard training software or use this kind of website. Requirement is an ability to start from 4 letters.

One of the earlier things I tried was to encourage myself to learn using a less awful layout (DVORAK as you suggested), and it didn't go very well unfortunately :(

That's very interesting about "developing" my fingers, I'll think on that, thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com