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Typing guide
Original articles about practising typing: how to start, how to drill, why one particular key keeps going wrong, which Wubi version to learn, and how to fix the pinyin mistakes that cost you the most time.
If you are just starting, read them in this order: posture and finger assignment first, then find your bottleneck under “Speed and accuracy”. Already using Wubi or pinyin? Jump straight to that section.
Getting started
Posture, hand shape and finger assignment — get the basics right first.
- Learning to touch type from zero: start with posture and hand positionIf your typing speed is stuck, the cause is usually not slow fingers but a posture you set wrong on the very first day.
- Why the home row is ASDF and JKL; — the eight keys everything hangs onThe home row is not a convention someone invented for teaching. It falls out of how far each finger can comfortably travel.
- Which finger owns which key — the complete assignment chartEvery key on a QWERTY keyboard belongs to a specific finger. Here is the full map, and the handful of places where people habitually cheat.
- The three stages of touch typing — from hunting to not thinkingTouch typing is not a single skill you switch on. It develops in three stages, and knowing which one you are in tells you what to practise.
- How long to practise each day — twenty minutes beats two hoursTyping practice follows the same rule as physical training: the signal comes from frequency and recovery, not from total hours logged.
Speed and accuracy
Find out where you are slow and where you slip before deciding what to drill.
- How typing speed is measured — WPM, CPM and KPH are three different thingsWPM, characters per minute and keystrokes per hour measure different things. Mixing them up is why your score looks different on every site you try.
- Accuracy first or speed first? Ninety-five percent is the dividing lineSpeed and accuracy are not independent goals. Below about 95% accuracy, pushing speed teaches you the wrong movement and makes you slower in the long run.
- Stuck at the same speed? The bottleneck is usually not your fingersWhen typing speed stops improving, the cause is rarely mechanical. It is almost always one of four things, and each has a different fix.
- Stop watching your overall accuracy — find the three keys you keep missingYour accuracy percentage is an average that hides the real problem. Two or three keys usually account for most of your mistakes.
Wubi
86 vs 98 vs New Century, how to memorise radicals, how to split a character.
- Wubi 86, 98 and New Century — which one should you actually learnThree Wubi versions exist and they are not interchangeable. Here is what differs, who still uses each, and how to choose without wasting months.
- How to memorise Wubi radicals — the five zones are a coordinate systemThe Wubi radical chart looks like 200 things to memorise by rote. It is actually five zones by five positions, and the structure does most of the work.
- The four rules for splitting characters in WubiMost Wubi confusion is not about radicals but about splitting order. Four rules resolve nearly every ambiguous character.
- Wubi short codes and phrase input — where the real speed comes fromFull Wubi codes are for learning the structure. Actual speed comes from one-key codes and typing whole phrases as single units.
Pinyin
Full pinyin or Shuangpin, and the mistakes almost everyone makes.
- Full pinyin or Shuangpin — look at what you actually type all dayShuangpin halves your keystrokes and is genuinely faster, but it only pays off under conditions most people do not have. Here is how to tell.
- The four mistakes pinyin typists make most — and the one cause behind themMost pinyin errors are not typos. They are a small set of pronunciation confusions that show up as a specific wrong character every time.
Numeric keypad
10-key technique for accounting, cashier and data-entry work.
Troubleshooting
Nothing happens when you type, characters will not come out, scores vanished.