Older but Mario Teaches Typing https://playclassic.games/games/educational-dos-games-online/play-mario-teaches-typing-online/
They make games where you have to spell words quickly or you lose and that’s how I learned as a kid.
Like one where you’re in a spaceship and have to shoot lasers at asteroids that are coming at your ship. You have to spell the word that’s written on the asteroid to hit it with a laser.
Idk if any of them are free but they’re basically simple coded flash games so I’m sure you could find one on the internet pretty easily
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! And Reader Rabbit. And Treasure Mountain (although that’s more math I think). Loved that shit as a kid.
1 Purchase The Typing of the Dead, the House of the Dead spinoff available for PC and Sega Dreamcast.
2 While TTotD is downloading or shipping go ahead and get some blacked out keyboard keys and install them.
Here’s the tricky part:
3 You have to learn to type or you will die.My first recommendation is maybe consider a different layout. If you have been typing for long you will have muscle memory that will be hard to erase, I could mostly blind type (though not touch type) on qwerty, I decided to learn Colemak for touch typing and have never looked back. I still retain the muscle memory and can type somewhat fast on qwerty but after years of correct typing I notice just how bad what I was doing was.
IIRC I used https://thetypingcat.com/typing-courses/basic and trained on that and similar websites for a long time. You have to know that you will be very slow during a while and have to be prepared for that, but it does pay out in the end. While I didn’t increased my typing speed significantly (70 to 85) it is a lot less strenuous on my hands.
A cardboard box:
I remember my parents in the 90s using a tea-towel over their hands and keyboard
this is what we used in the mid 90s. weird but worked.
Mavis beacon
https://www.keybr.com/ is a free 20 minutes a day practice tool that i tey to use daily. starts easy, then slowly ramps up to new letters for you to practice.
The way I learned to type is by dividing my laptop screen into a left side, where I read, like the news, or Kindle, or some website I like, and a smaller right side that I don’t look at, where I type into Word, or simply Notepad. I went from zero to 60 words a minute fairly quickly. I’m so used to it now that I like to type the books I read. It helps me also because I’m a diagonal reader. Typing what I read forces me to slow down and assimilate more of what I’m reading.
And put stickers on your keyboard. Start with a few on the home row and gradually expand once you don’t have to think about the location of the keys anymore.
In the 80’s we had games to learn touch typing that were very helpful and also quite fun, compared to old school methods.
Here’s a site that claims to have that sort of games:
https://www.typing.com/student/gamesWarning I have no idea if these are good, it’s just a random site a search came up with.
Good for you. I did not think typing was a skill that would be lost and so quickly. It boggles my mind they don’t teach it in school now.
eyelids
What if I don’t havs them?
TypingMaster for PC was what I learned multiple keyboard formats. Now i use one on mobile and another for touch typing!
You can probably torrent it or just buy it but it has everything you’ll need, you just need to do it everyday for 10-20 mins for a while. Helps to say the letters in you head maybe as you’re typing. Like simultaneously mentally speak the letters as you press them
It gets easier as you move on to actual words and you learn to naturally chunk them together as you gain proficiency and fluency
Honestly, just type a lot and try to get it done quickly. I never did anything specifically to try and learn, it just happened naturally following that for me.
I’ve heard people have a lot of success with various typing games, there’s a few on steam now if that’s your jam. Glyphica and The Typing of the Dead are the ones that immediately jump to mind
