Typing has a surprisingly dramatic history for something we now do almost without thinking. The first commercially successful typewriter, the Sholes & Glidden “Type Writer,” appeared in the 1870s and helped establish the QWERTY keyboard layout that is still with us today. Early typewriters were mechanical machines with metal type bars that physically struck inked ribbon against paper, and the spread of typewriting transformed offices, journalism, business, and clerical work. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, typing had become a serious vocational skill—and eventually a standard part of school and workplace training.
For Millennials and many older Gen Z students, keyboarding often became almost accidental practice. Home computers, school computer labs, instant messaging, forums, email, early social media, essays, and games meant spending hours on a physical keyboard. Many students also encountered formal typing lessons at school. That environment has changed. Younger students may be extremely comfortable with technology while spending much more of their digital lives tapping, swiping, using autocorrect, voice input, or typing with their thumbs on phones and tablets. Being a “digital native” therefore does not necessarily mean being a fluent keyboard typist. Research on elementary education has found that teachers consider keyboard automaticity important for writing and standardized-test performance, even though formal touch-typing instruction is often limited.
That matters more now because so many important assessments have moved onto screens. A student can understand a passage perfectly, know what they want to say, and still lose valuable time hunting for letters, correcting mistypes, or repeatedly looking down at the keyboard. Touchscreen familiarity does not automatically transfer to efficient ten-finger typing on a physical keyboard; touchscreen input itself involves different motor patterns and is especially prone to typing and correction errors. As digital SATs, TOEFL tests, school assessments, essays, and other computer-based exams become increasingly normal, typing is quietly becoming a test-preparation skill in its own right.
The good news is that typing is wonderfully trainable. A little regular practice can make keyboard location more automatic, improve accuracy, and free up more attention for the thing that actually matters: your ideas. And because typing is useful far beyond English, there is no reason to practice in only one language.
Want to get faster, more accurate, and more comfortable on the keyboard? Try our Multilingual Typing Practice Studio here — and practice typing across the languages you actually use.
Set up · Learn · Practise
Multilingual Typing Studio
Learn the correct input method, build each keyboard row step by step, then develop fluency through sentence challenges.
Choose a language to load its keyboard guidance and exercises.
Focus:
The highlighted keys belong to this lesson. Use the language-specific hand map below whenever you need to check a finger.
60-second sprint
Complete as many accurate sentences as you can
450 original sentences are available across the nine language libraries.
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practice directory
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Typing tutorials, games, and races
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