I've always thought of typing lessons as being a thing from long before computers. Back then it was treated as a serious skill which could lead directly to employment. Now it's just something you're expected to know.

I had plenty of basic IT education at school, but was never taught how to type at all.

It’s an interesting idea that we still “need” typing practice. We do it every day why would we need to practice extra?

To provide an additional use case, my wife just got me an awesome and completely configurable ergonomic keyboard for my birthday and I’m considering switching to Dvorak or Coleman layouts after typing QWERY my entire life. I NEED a long form practice like this instead of just typing nonsense short blurbs of words as most typing practice provides.

Super excited about this!

I practiced qwerty touch typing in school, but never really used it myself, rather using two-three fingers on each hand and letting them move around a lot across the keyboard.

I switched to dvorak over 10 years ago and since the letters on the keys didn't match, and because it's designed to make it easy to touch type, I quickly learned.

But after a year or so of dvorak, I grew tired of being extremely slow when I had to switch back to qwerty when using a shared keyboard in a conference room (imagine reading and hitting single letters in a meeting in front of people), so I switched back to qwerty. I thought that my new touch typing skill would transfer, but it didn't. I still try now and again to properly touch type, but it's slow and with a lot of mistakes. So this practice site looks very interesting to me as well!

Some people say that they can easily switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak, but it turns out that I couldn't. I still miss the speed and ease of dvorak, but I also enjoy being able to quickly use any keyboard now.

I had a similar experience switching to the Kinesis. I mean I don't think as stark as yours.

I noticed the Kinesis Advantage forced my hands into a position that encouraged touch-typing, so I thought I'd give it a try and learn to touch-type while doing my normal work (Still QWERTY though) It worked! I can now touch-type greatly...

Sort-of, it really only applies to the Kinesis though, when I go back to a normal staggered layout keyboard I go back to my two-three finger pecking around the keyboard.

It's obviously still the same layout, so I don't think I experience it as bad as you do on a standard keyboard, but now I'm pretty much stuck on my Kinesis!

I added the Dvorak layout to the computer in the conference room.

(This is probably a more acceptable thing to do in companies where more than one language is spoken. The computer already had English-Qwerty and Danish-Qwerty installed.)

I have a similar issue! When I learned Russian I installed the Russian keyboard layout on my computer. Because my keys (obviously) didn't match, I had to type by feel using a small diagram I printed as a reference, carefully placing index on f and j like you're supposed to. I just touch type in Russian now, but if I dare do that while typing English I stumble and lose track; I'm stuck doing it my normal messy (still faster than average) way.

> It’s an interesting idea that we still “need” typing practice. We do it every day why would we need to practice extra?

We all walk every day, but most people have terrible form and efficiency and would probably injure themselves if they tried to do it for long periods without practicing...

I’m not sure if context was lost in my comment but I tend to agree with what you’re saying here and was the point of my comment.

Does this really apply to typing, though? To what extent could one suffer from long-term injuries due to the way they're typing? I know one can suffer from repetitive strain injury if they are not using their mouse properly, but does this extend to keyboards as well?

Sadly it does!

If you have poor form when typing you can put considerable stress on your wrists and compress your shoulders.

That's why ergonomic keyboards are so big, weirdly shaped and sometimes split. They all try to force you into typing in a way that won't do as much damage to your body as slouching over a 10keyless microkeyboard would.

If you don't learn proper technique but type often, you will organically develop some method of typing that may work for you.

But it's easy when learning a skill without guidance to end up into a local maximum. It's easy to end up in a situation where you're typing reasonably well, but could do way better with training.

I'd argue that typing occupies a big enough place in our life that we should be very efficient at it.

It took me 3 years off and on (and mostly at work) to become fluent in Dvorak. Good luck!

If you do it on and off you'll be much slower. I switched cold-turkey to Colemak and could type reasonably after a month and quickly after 3 months. The hardest part was retraining my muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts (but it wasn't so bad because in Colemak many are unchanged)

My educational experience was almost the exact opposite. Computer class was always typing or application focused, rather than IT focused; typing exercises and learning how to use ClarisWorks rather than anything about how actual computer worked.

Similar experience here in suburban southern California public schools around the 2010s, except for one class on digital art, which was 90% packet work (funnily enough almost the equivalent of just copying out novels, but for Illustrator/Photoshop. Today I use them regularly and adeptly.)

Hey I'm thrilled you're enjoying the site! There are indeed plans to add a feature like that sometime in the future. Thanks!

Uploading custom books would be a killer feature. Please do :)

> Any chance of typing out custom uploaded books? Maybe copy pasted plaintext?

typeracer.com allows you to submit extracts for people to type; just not entire books.

Have you tried reading books out loud? I found that made a surprising difference to experience of books, even just because I was devouring them much slower. Found it much easier to enjoy the 'craft' of the book too.

Plus it helps train your speaking / pronunciation; if anything, there's muscles that may need to be exercised a bit.

"Librarians hate him!"

I had a similar experience doing translations. It made me a lot more aware to the fine detail of the text and sensible to the author's specificities.

Seconded, I use gnu typist often but the drills are too bland and I needed something like that. Superb

Yay for gtypist! It comes with typefortune(1), for which you can adjust the content of the drills by installing fortune files that suit your taste. Eg. you could

  sudo apt install fortunes; sudo chmod -r /usr/share/games/fortunes/!(lit*); typefortune -l

for something (fairly) like this.