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Chapter 6: Touch Typing

Summary: How I Learned to Touch Type using Colemak

• I learned how to change my keyboard layout to Colemak.
• I created a fast feedback loop by rearranging the physical keys on the keyboard, so if I forgot where a character was located, I could find it easily.
• I used the Keyzen typing tutor to learn the placement of characters by touch, learning the most-used characters first. Keyzen re-introduced characters to the training set as I made mistakes, so I spent most of my time practicing difficult characters until my accuracy improved.
• I practiced for 45 minutes every night, just before going to bed, so my brain could consolidate the motor skills into long-term memory most effectively.
• Once I got to functional speed (20 WPM), I switched to Type-Fu, focusing on typing sentences as fast as possible with over 99% accuracy.
• When I reached 40 WPM, I used Amphetype to train the most common English bigrams and trigrams, further increasing my speed and accuracy.
• Once I mastered the n-gram set, I switched to training the most common English words in Amphetype until I reached 60 WPM sustained with 99% accuracy, which happened at the 21 hour mark.

Keyzen-Colemak

Here's the typing trainer I hacked up to learn Colemak. The program is based on Keyzen, an open source typing trainer. I changed the character introduction order in the code to port it from QWERTY to Colemak.

Try the Keyzen-Colemak typing trainer

The 10,000 Most Common English Words

Here's a list of the 10,000 most common English words in order of frequency, as determined by n-gram frequency analysis of the Google Trillion Word Corpus.

This list is derived from Peter Novig's compilation of the 1/3 million most frequent English words.

I imported this list into Amphetype to create training sets of common words.

View the list on Github

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