Practice typing by retyping entire novels
typelit.io
typelit.io
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Initially, Menard's method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918-be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote-that looked to Menard less challenging (and there- fore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." ~ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges)
When I was learning Spanish in adulthood, I decided for practice to re-translate this Borges story back into Spanish, having never read it in the original. Incredibly challenging (for such a beginner), but also very amusing to see the overlaps and the differences.
You can load in whatever document you want as a source, and it'll randomly select chunks of whatever size you want (i.e. about 200 words-worth). It then gives you analysis of your performance, as well as breaking down what trigrams and words cause you the most trouble.
Combine this with ngram training to get the muscle memory of the most common chunks of english and you can really quickly improve your fluency [^2].
1: https://gitlab.com/franksh/amphetype
I could change the shortcuts in software, but then it starts a cascade of changed shortcuts. Plus, I could then only use software that I’ve specifically configured. How do you SSH into a server?
If you maintain your QWERTY muscle memory, you can use it as a fallback in foreign environments, but figuring out how to smoothly setup RC files on any target is probably the ideal: https://serverfault.com/questions/400522/how-to-use-a-custom...
Personally. I gave up on Dvorak in part due to this friction when I started introducing more and more tools like Vimperator (Firefox plugin, superseded by Tridactyl) into my workflow. The flexibility of switching on a vim mode anywhere and having it be 95% what I want is very high. The other factor was I still did a lot of same-machine peering then, which it added a lot of friction to. I do know highly capable engineers who go fully down the typing-ergonomics rabbit hole and stay there, but it does consume a fair amount of one's yak-shaving budget.
Couldn’t say if Colemak would work similarly well, but if your mental mapping for Vim commands is character-based (as opposed to position-on-keyboard-based) I imagine it would.
Worst case I suppose you could always revert to QWERTY.
I learned it well, switched to it completely, and it was great.
Except that it was absolutely horrible.
Not because of the layout, but: maybe it's just me, but I completely un-learned QWERTY.
Every time I had to touch someone else's computer, or a phone, or work with some kind of QWERTY embedded keyboard, it devolved into either immediately switching the layout, or looking like a clueless old person doing one finger typing while staring at the keyboard.
I just checked, and going into it cold, I can squirm at about 35 WPM on QWERTY (vs 130 on Colemak). It's annoying, but serviceable if I'm using someone's computer for a few minutes. For a longer situation, if they're using a mac or linux, I can switch them to Colemak in about thirty seconds (I had to do that in some onsite interviews a few years back), and if it's Windows, having to use QWERTY is probably the thing I'm least annoyed about.
I think about it a lot in comparison to the vast swath of more ambitious or complicated projects I've done. Such a small script I threw together due to an immediate want, that still has merit and potential utility a decade later.
Can it also select chunks sequentially so I don't lose the plot?
It will be like scale practicing of musical instrument.
Same. For some reason we always mix up "you" and "the", even though they are completely different words
I've been typing 120+ wpm for 20 years and it's actually surprising to me that this is a problem people have. It's that foreign to my experience.
I could be totally wrong. It could just be that typing happens in different ways in different people's brains and bodies and that's why I can't relate to this, but I'd challenge you to try correcting the letters rather than the words and see if that doesn't have a compounding effect on improving your speed.
Your nick, by the way, is perfectly suited to this endeavor.
The other day someone posted a webapp they wrote that doesn't let you edit and that blurs all the text except the current line while you're typing. If you want to edit your text, you need to download the file. His aim was to separate writing from editing, which I think it's an interesting approach.
I've never been entirely convinced by this argument. I will always make mistakes, so I could argue that I need to be able to quickly fix those mistakes, so I should practice doing so to some degree. The implication that fixing your mistakes somehow trains you to make mistakes seems tenuous.
I will admit that for me, my "end goal" allows me to see what I'm typing and requires me to correct my mistakes. If, for instance, your end goal has you not even seeing the text you're typing then there's probably no reason to go back and fix your mistakes.
This is where the musical instrument comparison breaks for me. If your goal with an instrument is a performance, then with a musical instrument you can't fix your mistakes during the performance. You will still make mistakes, of course, you just won't be able to fix them.
That said, if you're making a lot of mistakes then perhaps you're getting enough practice fixing them and should stop. It's just that I don't necessarily accept a hard rule that you should carry on regardless and the outcome will be better. I've never seen any research on this subject.
This is a problem many people have when practicing to play an instrument, they end up practicing but making so many mistakes that their muscle memory sees exposure to too many mistakes to get the right pattern down. By avoiding that through slowing down and practicing the right moves instead of a mixture of the right moves and the mistakes you will lay down patterns that are much more dependable.
When performing that pays off because then there is no way to fix your mistakes. So the best way to practice is to not make mistakes. And any practice method that helps you to do that is a good one. This is pretty much the philosophy being pianojacq.com, a sightreading / practicing application that I've been building over the last couple of years and the effect on my own ability to learn and practice without mistakes has been huge. That does not imply that this is for everybody but from my own experience to slow down, even if that means being agonizingly slow for a number of passes without mistakes has a pay-off that is much higher than practicing the same piece with mistakes at a higher speed. Once you do the right thing, speed is easy. As long as you don't do the right thing speed is irrelevant.
Slowing down during your deliberate practice to the point where you don't make many mistakes could well be optimal, and something I should probably do more of. Albeit it still isn't clear to me what we should do with the occasional mistake we make even while going slow, but I accept that you think we should ignore them.
For me, depending on the complexity of a given piece that can be anywhere from 5% to 20% or so of indicated tempo for the first times that I practice a piece. One of the hardest things to take into account when practicing slow is that you should still use the exact same fingerings as you would when playing fast because otherwise all of your practice is for nothing!
In practice it does. The common advice is to go back to the start of the phrase when you make a mistake practicing instrument.
https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-...
Hunter S. Thompson Typed Out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learning How to Write Like the Masters
edit: I was oddly talking about this today to my partner. I've honestly never heard of anyone doing it outside of Hunter.. but that might just be because Hunter mentioned it in such a cool way.
Writing code is limited by the pace of you being able to think up sound effective code.
I can't recall where I saw it but believe I heard a rule of thumb of only 40wpm pretty much mazing out most people's ability to write code.
Reference: The Internet
(For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/966800)
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Sure, code written (and rewritten) (and deleted) versus net output. But maybe be more thoughtful, do less than 40wpm, and write a better solution overall.
I think the point is 40wpm allows you to code. If you wrote at 10 lines per day, 80 char per line works out to 0.0333wpm.
You'll forget what you're doing by the time get a word out.
As in once you hit 40wpm you won't be slowed by your typing as you try to code.
(WPM is characters per minute over 5, i.e. assumes average word is 5 chars long).
I hear this argument all the time and I don't buy it. Yes, my thinking is slower than 100 wpm on average, but it is extremely bursty. It goes at 0 wpm most of the time then 10000 wpm for short intervals.
I believe the fundamental concern here is not average speed, but latency. How fast can you get the current thought onto the page so that your brain can move on to think about the next thing?
I also type at 100 wpm, and I find my wetware CPU experiences stalled cycles while I'm typing, not able to continue because it needs to hold on to a buffer containing the thought I'm slowly typing out.
But, I expect it's diminishing returns on effort.
If you type 30WPM, you'll probably benefit yourself (and your colleagues!!) from learning to type quicker. 80 WPM seems reasonable; 100 WPM is good; 180 WPM is excellent. -- But, I think above some point, the costs of training to type quicker aren't justified by the benefits.
Are these benefits enough to make it the best thing in terms of ROI? I would suspect only rarely.
- If you're not yet at the point where you can understand what you're typing, you are probably served better by more traditional language learning activities. - If you do understand it perfectly you're probably at an advanced enough level that just reading it at your normal reading speed, or writing your own stuff and then having a native speaker is a better form of practice. - If you can understand it with effort but not at a comfortable reading speed yet - you're probably best served by throwing the individual sentences along with machine translations into a spaced repetition system like Anki. Then you can see the same sentence multiple times over the course of a few days and deepen your understanding a little more each time.
I started the count of monte cristo not knowing it was about 2000 pages, so that’s what I read for the whole of 2019 basically. At least when going to bed.
Typing it completely seems like a huge undertaking.
I am actually translating The Count of Monte Cristo. Completed 5 chapters so far. Still a loooooooong way to go.
What are you translating it to? From which language?
I am not using any automated translations except to find esoteric translations (using Google Translate). Many idioms and phrases also have to be localized, so it is an intellectual challenge.
Alexander Dumas' writing is also quite beautiful and even in the limited number of chapters I have completed translating there are some excellent narratives. I am enjoying it.
My idea is to eventually publish it as a bi-lingual ebook, perhaps it would help people who are learning English/Tamil.
With reading, I always find myself moving my eyes back a few sentences because I would think I missed some unimportant information, taking me a while before I actually got into it. Maybe it's just because technology hurt my attention span.
So I'd suggest two enhancements to the author. Firstly, for each book, state the exact source, including the retrieval date. Then make sure that the up to date version of each book is used.
I also wonder if there could be a way to make all this typing more useful. There are so many books lacking OCR, or lacking review after a poor OCR.
It would be a subversive way to get students to read literature...
Frankly you start on a chapter one and see if you like it, then read the rest. I was surprised about how much I liked the first few pages of 1984 -- which was written around 80 years ago.
Your typing speed has no affect on your ability to be a good developer. While I don’t “hunt and peck” and I can type without looking at the keyboard most of the time, I physically can’t touch type.
I type with one hand and I’ve been programming since 1986 as a hobbyist for 10 years and then a professional. Last time I checked, I typed at about 45 wpm.
Most of my professional career though I’ve used statically typed language and from 2010-2020 mostly C# with JetBrains R# - with excellent shortcuts and autocomplete.
I just started working on my first project with the assistance of ChatGPT. It’s amazing how well it does at taking regular English sentences and writing and modifying Python and JavaScript code - even less typing.
I think you mean to say that your ability to type at 45 wpm has a minimal impact on your ability to be a good developer. To me, 45 wpm is moderate but not slow. I have seen developers who type at around 10-15 wpm.
I have noticed that developers who are slower typers are more likely to fight back on simple changes and writing documentation. It just takes them more time to do the same amount of work that a faster typist will take. In my experience, slow typer are great at reasoning about the code base and coming up with designs in their head, but poor at writing code and communicating with text either through email/slack or documentation.
People who are not fast typist can be very smart but will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to using the keyboard.
> nouveaux
Also, I type a lot faster on my phone than a keyboard. I met my manager for the first time in person a year after he became my manager (Covid travel restrictions). In our first team meeting, I mentioned that if he sees my typing on my phone a lot it’s because I am on Slack talking to my coworkers or customers (I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech specializing in cloud application development and “DevOps”).
As far as documentation, my job requires a lot of writing.
For my current project I’m writing a lot of small one off Python scripts. You would be surprised how well ChatGPT can “explain” what a script involving AWS automation does in plain English and I can even ask it “Why would I use this” and it often gives me a good enough bottom line up front summary.
I’d say time spent typing is much less of a factor than how that typing is done.
(*) The first big fix for me was switching from a desk to laptop on a couch where I could change positions every few minutes. The short travel and light weight of laptop keys also helped. I switched back to a desk more recently, but I kept the low-profile light keys, and the general awareness of postural stress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA#ReCAPTCHA_v1_(human-...
I improved my wpm not by switching to dvorak, but by learning the new layout without looking at the keyboard while I type.
Practicing on code sounds dumb because you could just write code, but I find drilling this way to be really helpful as you can just focus all your attention on training accuracy. (Added benefit - you perhaps subconsciously memorize your frameworks code if you use, say, Django to practice your Python.)
It’s a really small, dumb improvement but it’s something ML would be useful for and you probably won’t need much data to produce something reasonable. Current “simulated typing” looks clearly simulated, as every letter has an even delay and humans don’t type evenly (e.g. I’m sure repeat letters are typed faster)
On thay site you can race against other players (or bots?).
There were also those programs that could teach you how to type with 10 fingers, but they were very boring. The one I remember would start by teaching you 2 character combinations (like gh zo wm er jk) what was very dull.
Shameless plug: I’ve also made a somewhat similar site: https://typingtool.app/ because I didn’t really like the look of it.
I don't know what she learned about religion or the techniques of the fantasy novel, or whether this made her a better typist.
PS: I didn't measure my speed back then, but it definitely worked. I go at 90+ wpm these days without a sweat!
That's interesting. Do they really use it though? What I can see from other part of the world that even developers don't use it.
Think of it as a purpose built variant of typing apps. You can also do many things on Excel or Word, but sometimes it's more convenient to perform some tasks with a purpose-built app that is built for your problem domain.
I'll give this a try for sure when I'm on my computer.