How long does it take to learn touch typing? What the research says

How long does it take to learn touch typing?

Honestly? Nobody can give you a reliable number. No rigorous study has measured how many hours or weeks an adult needs to learn touch typing, on QWERTY or on AZERTY. The round figures on course sites don't come with a study behind them. What research does offer is smaller, and more useful: how long one group needed to beat its old speed, why people slip back, and which kind of practice pays off.

The closest thing to an answer comes from a 2003 study by Eldad Yechiam and colleagues. Their 22 students took a touch-typing course that ended once their touch-typing score beat their old one, which took about 8 hours of training on average (Human Factors). Before the course, they typed 18.4 words per minute while looking at the keys, and only 8.1 when they tried not to look (Yechiam et al.).

Read the chart from left to right. The course ended at 21.1 words per minute, only a little faster than before, and the real gain came after: six more hours took the group to 28.7, and two weeks later they were still at 25.8 (Yechiam et al.). So those 8 hours mark the point where touch typing catches up with your old way, not the point where you're done.

And they're 8 hours for people who started below 20 words per minute. If you already rattle off emails with two fingers, the road back to your old speed is longer, and no study has measured how much longer. That's not a reason to skip it. It's a reason to measure your own curve instead of trusting someone else's promise. What counts as a good typing speed gives you the averages to compare against.

Why do people go back to typing with two fingers?

Because during the learning stretch, the old way wins every single day. Yechiam's team calls it melioration: the pull towards whatever pays off right now, which in typing means looking at the keys because it feels faster today. Earlier research had already found that "success in touch-typing training does not ensure its continuation into everyday use" (Yechiam et al.). Finishing a course and keeping the habit are two different things.

Their own experiment tried to tip the balance. A small extra task asked typists to react to signals on the screen, which made keeping their eyes up pay off, and it weakened the pull of the old habit and helped the skill last (Human Factors). You don't need a lab for the same idea. Decide in advance where you'll touch type, for example every message on your laptop, and stick to it even on the days it's slower.

The trap: for a while your old way is faster. Switching back feels smart at that moment, and that's exactly how the new skill gets lost.

Why am I slower when I start touch typing?

Because you're swapping a method that works for one that doesn't work yet. Every keystroke you used to find by sight, you now have to find by feel, and that costs time before it saves any. The students in Yechiam's study went from 18.4 words per minute with their old method to 8.1 without looking (Yechiam et al.). That gap is the dip, and it's normal.

A second study saw the same shape. Higher education students with and without learning disabilities took a touch-typing program of 14 lessons; right after it, the speed of the students without learning disabilities had decreased, but three months later both groups were significantly faster than before the program, and their accuracy stayed above 95% (Weigelt Marom and Weintraub). There was no control group, so you can't fully separate the course from three months of student life.

Research on learning skills in general, not typing in particular, gives the dip a friendlier name. Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt describe dips as the mark of exploration, when performance drops because you're trying out a new method, and leaps as the moment that new method starts to work (Cognitive Science). Feeling clumsy is a sign you're changing something, not a sign you're failing.

How should you practise: short sessions or long ones?

Short and spread out. In a classic 1978 study, the researchers Baddeley and Longman taught 72 postal workers to type on four different schedules (Ergonomics). Learning was most efficient with one session of one hour a day, and least efficient with two sessions of two hours a day (Baddeley and Longman). Their conclusion: spread training out over time instead of cramming it together.

There's a catch, and it's a human one. The one-hour group liked its schedule the least (Baddeley and Longman). Spreading practice out feels slow, because the hours pile up more slowly. It still got them further per hour of practice.

Note what that study didn't test: nobody practised for fifteen minutes, because the shortest schedule was an hour. So when we suggest 15 to 20 minutes a day, that's the spacing idea applied to typing, not a measured dose. The point is a session short enough that you'll actually do it tomorrow, and the day after.

Should you practise accuracy or speed first?

Accuracy first, while your fingers are learning the way. Speed once they know it. That's how our course is built: in modules 1 to 3 an exercise asks for 90% correct and the lessons have no clock, and speed only counts from module 5, in tests. A fast wrong keystroke teaches your finger the wrong way.

Later on, aiming for speed does seem to matter. In a study of 60 undergraduates who averaged 33.02 net words per minute, having a speed goal in everyday typing went with typing faster (r = .44), and the best typists had taken a class and tried to type fast (Keith and Ericsson). That's a correlation measured at one moment: it doesn't prove that aiming for speed makes you faster.

Two other findings show where the line lies. A large study of French students typing on AZERTY found that simply using a keyboard a lot can build real expertise along the way, without setting out to learn (Pinet et al.), while a lab study concluded that going beyond 70 words per minute takes some form of deliberate practice (Feit et al.). Typing a lot makes you decent; getting really quick takes practice aimed at it. In the course, that starts with typing in time: rhythm before speed.

Do you need to memorise the keyboard layout?

No, and skilled typists can't do it either. In a study of 100 skilled typists, who averaged 72 words per minute at 94% accuracy, people could correctly place only 15 letters on average on a blank QWERTY keyboard (Snyder et al.). Fifteen out of twenty-six, from people who type every letter many times a day without a thought.

The knowledge lives in the fingers, not in a picture in your head. So don't study a keyboard diagram; type. Put your index fingers on F and J, keep your eyes on the screen, and let your fingers do the remembering.

That line ran on Lurndo's typing engine, right in your browser. It judges the text that arrives, character by character, and counts accuracy on your first keystroke for each character, so a slip you fixed still counts as a slip. On a phone, the exercise asks for a keyboard: touch typing needs fingers on real keys.

Can you learn touch typing as an adult, or at 60?

Yes, though no study tells you how long it takes at a given age. What research does show is reassuring for later on. In a 1984 study of experienced typists, older typists were slower at tapping and at choice reactions, but not slower at typing, because they looked further ahead in the text (Salthouse).

Keep the caveat in mind: those were people who already typed well, not people learning. The study shows that age doesn't have to cap your speed once you have the skill; it doesn't show that learning goes as quickly at 60 as at 20. Short lessons, no clock and your own pace help at any age, and learning to type at any age shows what that looks like in the course.

A realistic plan for learning touch typing

There's no honest way to promise you a number of weeks, but there is a sensible order to do things in. This is our advice, built on the studies above. The order and the minutes are our own choices, not the results of a trial, so fit them to your life:

1. Measure where you start. Take the free typing speed test for 60 seconds and write down your net speed and your accuracy separately.
2. Learn the alphabet first. The home row, then the top row, then the bottom row. In Lurndo that's modules 1 to 3, eighteen lessons, and they're free. Start with F and J and work up to the whole home row.
3. Accuracy before speed. Aim for nine out of ten keys right, and slow down when you miss.
4. A short session every day. Pick fifteen to twenty minutes you'll actually keep up, rather than saving it all for one long Sunday.
5. Use it for real. Type your everyday messages the new way, even while it's slower. That's the answer to melioration.
6. Measure once a week. Same test, same length. Expect a dip at first, and watch your own curve climb past it.

Want to see how the modules build on each other, from two keys to the full keyboard and on to punctuation, digits and accents? Touch typing for beginners walks through the whole course, module by module, and shows which parts are free.

What's different on AZERTY?

If you type on a Belgian AZERTY keyboard, two things trip people up. The digits need Shift: without it, the top row gives signs like & and é. And the full stop needs Shift too, on the key below K, with your other hand on Shift. Lurndo gives each of them a lesson of its own, with the digits in the number row, and touch typing on AZERTY covers the rest of the layout.

You don't need to know how long it will take to start. Your first lesson takes a few minutes, and the first three modules are free: put your fingers on F and J and see where your own curve goes.