Touch typing lesson 5: Lessons 1 - 4

Keys and finger movements

Keyboard layout: English US.

Combine the keys from the earlier lessons in a steady rhythm. If the same transition keeps causing errors, revisit the lesson that introduced it before increasing your speed.

• f: F
• j: J
• d: D
• k: K
• g: G
• h: H
• s: S
• l: L
• a: A
• ;: ;
• e: E
• i: I

Typing entire words quickly

Touch typing involves fast and accurate typing of entire words. Repeating individual keys several times in a row is useful in typing lessons, although such sequences are less common in everyday texts. When we practice typing entire words, we learn sequences of keystrokes for common words so that we do not have to think through each finger movement. This resembles reading a familiar word without examining each letter, although typing still requires pressing all the keys in sequence.

In ordinary English text, words such as "the", "then" and "them" share a beginning but need different endings. A familiar beginning can tempt your fingers to finish the word too soon. Look ahead to the ending while typing the first letters. If you regularly swap two letters, slow down at that transition instead of starting the whole word faster.

Research on English vocabulary has estimated that adult native speakers with a university education know around 20,000 word families. A word family consists of a base word and related forms, such as walk, walked, and walker. In the Brown corpus of written English, the 1,000 most frequent words, with their inflected forms counted together, accounted for about 72 percent of the words in the texts. This is a measure of vocabulary coverage; understanding also depends on context, grammar, and knowledge of less common words.

Practicing typing frequently used vocabulary focuses on the words you are likely to type most often. It can improve typing fluency and reinforce familiarity with spelling and vocabulary, especially when you practice typing in a foreign language.