Learn to type faster
Typing Trainer offers a variety of tools regarding typing skills. It is a useful teacher for those just becoming aware of touch typing. It also offers a package for the workplace professional seeking to appraise recruit’s typing skills. This entirely free web course wants to double your typing speed and allow practitioners to type as fluently as they speak. Simply navigate around the site for speed boosting tutorials. The 14 part lesson plan supplies over four hours of practice time. The material provided is, at times, informational rather than immersive. Typing Trainer is also a respite from those lessons for those who’d rather play games. It introduces 100+ games made to replicate the classic arcade-style and designed to develop the dexterity of your digits.
Typing Trainer trains for a time
If you’re ready to learn to type and enjoy extra homework, keep going with Typing Trainer.
There are five pages Typing Trainer introduces you to. There is Typing Test, Typing Practice, Typing Game Zone, TypeTastic for Schools and Test for Recruiters. The site skews towards a beginner’s needs but does offer something for those with more experience as well.
To begin with Typing Trainer, complete the typing practice and introduction. This will appraise your current skills and layout your trajectory with the tutorials. Motoric warm-ups aim to develop muscle memory regarding the location of buttons without looking at them. Lessons are broken down by letter groups. Two letters which use similar strokes or fingers comprise a lesson.
Even the uninitiated may find these lessons to be a bit rote. After all, isn’t there essentially one thing to learn to understand the touch-type method? Once you are introduced to the ‘home-row’, what else is there to learn? Getting more skilled at typing simply comes with the will to do so and continued practice.
The games are likely to keep you coming back, if you do at all. In stock are games with titles such as KeyTower, Space Race, Type and Jump ‘N’ Run, and KeyBall Maze. Even still, these games are exceedingly simple and easy to get bored of after just a few minutes. What these games lack in engagement, they make up with abundance. There are more than 100 games at your disposal here so you can move on to the next as soon as one bores you.
The page is designed mainly in blue to keep things uncontroversial but also deploys splashes of color to keep from being terribly mundane. The design should not be irritating nor too boring because learning to type is already among the less exciting things to do with a day’s time. At least, it’s not bad to look at as well.
Advertisements on the page are abundant and frequent enough to genuinely sour the learning experience. Banners and videos pop-ups are relentless and slow the loading time of the pages. More than once were two or more video ads were running as I tried my best to speed through a practice round.
Where can you run this program?
You can run this application on Window’s or Mac systems. The benefits of Typing Trainer are available to anyone with access to the internet. Whether you use Mozilla, Chrome, Safari or any other web browser you can visit Typing Trainer.com. Enjoyment on the site is improved greatly if visited on a laptop or desktop computer. The site is not optimized for mobile devices.
Is there a better alternative?
There is an alternative which has put to use the tremendous advances in technology towards the science of typing. Keybr is the place for addicting typing practice. With an innovative AI, this site hones in your particular needs. When you visit the page, a series of informational cards guide you through the unique features of the program. Once you start typing you become much more engaged with the program. Keybr does an excellent job of exposing your weak points. Once aware of them, keybr compels you to scratch that itch. This program is properly addicting.
Our take
Typing Trainer is a surprisingly big site and it suffers from that vastness. None of the corners of the site rise up enough to stand out against their respective competitors. With that, only those at the very early stages of learning to type can benefit from this site.
Should you download it?
Yes but once you have learned the basics, you’re probably best off finding a game that keeps your interest and practicing it over and over. It is difficult although not impossible to imagine one devoting four hours to learning the basics. If you are taking your first keyboard techniques class, this site will serve as a practical aid. With that said, very many of us wish to get even more proficient in our typing skills and Typing Trainer is not a great place to start in that endeavor. Give the lessons a shot and if you can stay engaged with two-letter reach repetitions then the more power to you. You have Siddhartha-like patience.