Typing Club and Touch Typing

So, in my current educated-oriented mood, I decided to broaden my horizons. I have been an avid use of Pocket (known years ago as Read it later) for a number of years now, mostly as a repository of all the articles I've read (as, inevitably, I would lose articles that might be useful for academic argument... Or pointless internet arguments...) but also as time went on for reading things later. I was also probably one of the few people that loved Mozilla's decision to purchase and integrate Pocket into Firefox, and also quite like Pocket recommendations (one of the rare places you can find curated, intelligent, content I've found... Like a Google News/Facebook Feed of more in-depth articles... And zero Daily Mail). Anyway, this suggestion for additional learning came from one of those recommendations.

It is an article about someone who recently learned to touch-type at 29, and how it has improved his workflow as a programmer. Fitting the bill of being both 29 and learning programming, it seemed to make sense I may as well try to start learning touch-typing as well. It's something I'll aim to do daily, alongside my programming course.

My first thoughts when visiting the aptly named TypingClub were that it was very reminiscent of DuoLingo from its home page. It is clear they have gone for a similar gamification route (where tasks are cut up into small 3 minute chunks, and you are given "badges" or achievements for doing a certain amount each day). That is fine by me; I have seen through learning German that Gamifying it turns it from a chore to something incredibly addictive, that you can quickly dip in and out of (usually meaning you end up spending more time with it each day than you might have done learning traditionally, because of its easy pick-up-and-play design). My only gripe is it doesn't quite have the polish of DuoLingo in some places... The results screen looks pretty ugly, and isn't helped by having an ad at the bottom. Although I guess it is better to have it on your results, rather than while you're trying to type!!

Starting from the beginning turns your keyboard from that familiar thing you can just about "pretend" to touch type, to something entirely alien where you find yourself constantly pausing to think where the next key is, and constantly hitting the wrong key because of muscle memory. And yet, as you start learning more finger/key placements, you slowly find something "clicks", like something is being reconnected in your brain, and you start to find the placements tallying up with that map in your brain again... Just that the map now covers all your fingers, rather than a few. Seriously though, those first couple of sessions learning to touch-type just random combinations of F and J repeatedly feel so alien... Suddenly it's like the letters look completely unfamiliar, the keyboard feels unfamiliar; it's so strange to think how our brains chunk up the words and know how to spell those words from that muscle memory, whilst changing up how you type completely shatters all that and feels like you're relearning to type all over again.

Anyway, I ended up spending 20 minutes with an average typing speed of 14wpm, which interestingly was consistently well above the minimum speed to pass. It doesn't compare with the 40wpm I can type while writing this (I most certainly didn't write this post as slow as my touch-typing speed!), but hopefully it will make this one task that takes up most of my life more efficient.