During my exploration of the Glove80 keyboard, I discovered many resources that can significantly improve typing speed and aid in learning new keyboard layouts. I prefer to stick with the QWERTY layout to stay familiar, especially since I might switch to a laptop or other devices in the future. While I practice on QWERTY, I remain open to other formats.
Step 1: KeyBR
KeyBR Is legitimately the best resource to learn how to type from scratch. If you’re first learning the home row, you want to ensure you do it very slowly and stick to the correct fingers for the correct keys. KeyBR will take you slowly through every KeyBR is genuinely the optimal resource for learning touch typing from the beginning. When initially learning home row positioning, it is essential to proceed gradually and to adhere strictly to the correct finger-key assignments. KeyBR meticulously guides users through each individual key, advancing only once mastery of the previous key is achieved. This method effectively facilitates comprehensive familiarization with the keyboard from the ground up. It starts with a single key and only progresses to the next ones, which are usually harder once you’re completely familiar with the previous key you just learned. It’s a great way to get completely familiarized with your keyboard from scratch.
Step 2: Ngram-Type
Ngram-Type Ngram refers to a sequence or grouping of characters, and they are usually ranked to describe the most common ones. Historically, ngrams have been used in cryptography to decrypt messages. Today, they have many applications, such as spam classification, auto-completion, and spell-checking. Technically, ngrams can also be words, and vice versa.
Human languages, including English, follow a power law curve called Zipf’s law: a very small set of words makes up the vast majority of actual usage. Based on an analysis of the Brown Corpus (1964), a 1-million-word collection of 500 modern English documents, only 135 words account for 50 percent of all English usage. The word “the” itself accounts for 7.5 percent, while “of” accounts for 3.5 percent.
Therefore, N-grams are useful and effective training data. The better you can type these sequences of characters, the quicker you’ll be at typing overall. However, no free online typing website currently incorporates n-grams. Most typing tests on various sites focus on common English words. This project aims to create a training environment to improve your typing speed and accuracy by concentrating on performance with small, controlled phrases or chunks. After all, perfect training starts with practicing on a small, precise set of data.
Step 3: MonkeyType
MonkeyType is the best resource once you’re familiar with your keyboard and basic letters. After mastering the challenges MonkeyType offers, it’s time to review and learn all the symbols and capitalizations. You can either start with KBR or go straight into it. In my opinion, MonkeyType has the best user interface among the available options.