Touch typing basics: how to learn in two weeks
What touch typing actually is
Touch typing means typing without looking at the keys, with every finger assigned to a fixed set of keys. That is the entire definition. It is not a faster way to hunt and peck, and it will feel slower for the first week, because you are replacing a habit you can do badly with one you are learning to do well. The payoff is not tomorrow; it is in a month, when the letters stop being decisions and start being reflexes.
The home row and the zones
Your anchors are the home row: A S D F for the left hand, J K L semicolon for the right, with your index fingers resting on the F and J. You can feel the two small bumps on those keys; they exist so your hands can find the row without sight. From there, each finger owns one column: the left index covers R F V and T G B, the right index covers Y U H J N M, and so on up and down the two rows above and below. The thumbs share the space bar. Learn the zones as a map, and the keys stop being 101 separate things.
Posture before speed
Set up before you practice. Sit so your forearms are parallel to the floor and your elbows are at roughly a right angle, which usually means raising the chair until your wrists float above the desk instead of resting on its edge. The top third of the screen sits at eye level, about an arm's length away. Feet flat on the floor. This takes five minutes once and pays off every day after; keyboard posture problems are cumulative and so are their consequences.
The two-week plan
Days 1 to 3: home row only, ten minutes a day, typing each letter in patterns until the two hands feel independent. Days 4 to 7: add the top row and the simplest punctuation, still ten to fifteen minutes. Week two: add the bottom row and capitals with the shift chord, and start typing full words and sentences slowly. Never practice more than twenty minutes a day in the beginning; accuracy decays with fatigue and you would be training the wrong thing. Take a benchmark on day one and day fourteen: same passage, same conditions.
Stopping the look-down habit
Every look at the keyboard costs you about a second and breaks the mental map you are trying to build. The classic fix is physical: drape a thin cloth or a piece of cardboard over your hands while you type. It feels ridiculous for about ten minutes and works better than any app. Slow down until your accuracy recovers to around 97 percent without looking. If that means typing at 10 WPM, that is the honest number to train at today.
Common mistakes
The first is migrating: using one finger to chase keys outside its column, which quietly rebuilds hunt-and-peck inside the new system. The second is pressing the shift key with the same pinky that will type the letter, which forces a contortion and doubles the error rate on capitals; use the opposite hand's shift. The third is measuring speed every session. Speed is noisy week to week; measure accuracy daily and speed weekly, or you will chase numbers instead of skill.
Tools
You need a keyboard and something worth typing. Type Sprint is a free typing test that runs in your browser: every run uses a real passage from a book or a speech, so you practice capitals and punctuation from the first day, and the weak-key panel literally shows which letters to drill tomorrow. No signup, and your history stays on your device.