I never learned touch typing. I had enough chances to do it, but I didn’t. I guess that I never saw a reason for me to learn it and there was most of the time something else which attracted my interest. As example in School, we had dedicated classes for that and even there I found ways to avoid it. How? Quite simple, back then we didn’t had internet at home and guess where I had a reliable once in a week for one one hour access to the sweet world wide web…yeah exactly in those touch typing classes. I was a teenager back then, and I had different priorities. Do I regret it? Absolutely not. There were tension and sweat because some downloads had to be completed before we got kicked out by the end of the class. Yeah I can see a collection of stories about that time, moving huge files in a time where most portable storage medias had no chance holding that amount of data. Ahh god old days.
Anyway, back to touch typing. I work quite a lot on the keyboard and a few years ago I started to realize, that I was limited by my typing speed. At least it felt like that. So I started to practice, I found a nice website for that and spend every day a little practicing. All went good until I reached a part where the website was confused about a certain letter which was frequently used Germany but not Switzerland. Yeah, the sharp s or in Switzerland the double s. So I tried to find a solution for that and got frustrated which lead to me quitting.
A few months ago I gave it another shot and this time I avoided the German language completely by switching to the international US keyboard layout. Switching to this layout was one of the decisions in my live, I wish I’d had done sooner.
Over the years, I developed my own typing system by looking at the keyboard and using like 6 to 8 fingers most of the time. It worked, but I felt slow and I wanted to change that. So I started practicing and forced myself to not look at the keyboard. I started with rough 12WPM and within one month I increased that to 30WPM. That felt really good and today it stagnated at around 50-60WPM. I’m going to improve it more in the future, but for know it speeds up the communication with the computer enough for me.
I will probably write tomorrow more about that learning process. My hour is running out aka I’ll try something new
Cheers my friends. See Ya tomorrow.