Learn to type
Start with four letters, not twenty-six. Add the next one when the last one sticks. This page is the whole path, and every stage of it is free with no account.
Updated 12 August 2026 · for complete beginners upward
If you have been told you type “wrong”, start here. Researchers put motion-capture markers on 30 people's hands and measured it: self-taught typists averaged 58.93 WPM against 57.83 WPM for people who had taken a proper touch-typing course — not a significant difference. Some participants using one or two fingers per hand reached speeds “normally attributed to touch typists.” The figures and citations are here. You are not starting from behind.
The path
Five stages. Do not skip ahead — each one exists because the next is much harder without it.
Find your anchor
Rest your left index finger on F and your right index finger on J. Both keys have a raised bump you can feel without looking — that is what they are for. Let your other fingers fall onto the keys beside them.
This position is home. Every key you press is a departure from it and a return to it. Getting back without looking is the entire skill.
Learn a few letters properly
Do not try to learn the keyboard. Open KeyForge, which starts you on a small set of letters and only introduces a new one once you are reliable on the current set.
The reason this works is that a small letter set still makes real words, so you are typing English from the first minute rather than drilling nonsense. A newly unlocked letter is deliberately drilled hardest, right when it is weakest.
Stop looking down
This is the one stage most people skip, and the one that sets your ceiling. Looking at the keyboard means re-finding your hand position after every key, which is exactly the “global hand motion” that the research found separates slow typists from fast ones.
Cover your hands with a cloth, or turn on blind mode so you cannot check your work mid-test. It will be slower and more annoying for a week or two. Then it is permanent.
Same finger, same key, every time
This is the single most evidence-backed instruction on this page. Fast typists press a given letter with the same finger every time; slow typists vary depending on what came before, and each variation is a decision that costs milliseconds.
Note what this does not say. It does not say use the textbook finger. If you hit B with your right index finger and a chart says left, that costs you nothing — as long as it is always the right index finger.
Alternate practice and measurement
Now a timed test is meaningful. Run one 60-second test to get a baseline, then keep the two activities separate: KeyForge to improve, timed tests to measure. Practising and testing at once does neither well.
Then add punctuation and capitals, which is where nearly everyone's second plateau lives.
What to expect
We will not give you a week-by-week schedule, because we could not find a credible study behind any of the ones you will see elsewhere. What we can give you is the real distribution, so you know what the numbers mean when you get there.
| Speed | Where that sits |
|---|---|
| Under 26 WPM | Slowest 10% of people — where nearly everyone starts |
| Around 40 WPM | Below average, and past the awkward stage |
| 52 WPM | The measured population average |
| 78 WPM and above | Fastest 10% of people |
Those thresholds come from a study of 168,960 people, cited in full on the research page. Beginners routinely find the first number reassuring: the slowest 10% is not a verdict, it is a starting line that most typists once stood on.
Fifteen minutes, not two hours. This is motor learning. Short daily sessions are the standard recommendation and consistent with how motor skills generally form — though we should say plainly that we have not found a typing-specific study measuring it. What we can say from the data is that practice volume alone is a weak predictor: participants who had taken a full typing course were only about 5 WPM faster than those who had not.
A first session
| Minutes | Do this |
|---|---|
| 0–2 | Find F and J by touch. Type your own name a few times without looking down. |
| 2–10 | KeyForge — slowly, accurately, same finger each time. Speed is not the goal today. |
| 10–14 | Keep going with your hands covered. Expect it to feel worse. It is supposed to. |
| 14–15 | One 1-minute test, purely to record where you started. |
Write that first number down somewhere. In two months it will be the most motivating thing on this page.
Start with a few keys
KeyForge opens on a small letter set and grows with you. No account, no ads, nothing to install.
Start practising →