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    Best typing tutor?

    • Started by tantrix
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    • Registered: 28-Aug-2008
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    28-Aug-2008 15:40:37#1 Best typing tutor?

    I recently learnt about Colemak through the Master Key app and decided to switch to Colemak. I'm disappointed with Master Key's preset Colemak "drills": it seems to be full of uncommon patterns that seem more about what someone thinks would be good for learning than actually is. For example there's tons of "hn tt ss rr ii taii ifso" stuff which are not reflective of actual English digraph/triad frequency. So when real words come up in the tests my brain gets fried typing long sequences of unfamiliar patterns.

    I tried aTypeTrainer4Mac ("a" means "advanced", for anyone else confused by this...) which is cute but seems to also require the user to type nonsense.

    So my question is: are there are any typing tutors that have any of the following characteristics:
       * train based on digraph/triad frequency
       * train based on word frequency (i.e. bias towards more common words available from the set of training letters)
       * have some sort of adaptive training to 'pick on' letters/digraphs/triads that the trainee is having trouble with
       * other ideas?

    It seems like Master Key is potentially very close; it's possible to edit the drill texts (although they have an unfortunate format of special characters) and it collects a ton of stats, but no adaption that I'm aware of.

    Alternatively if anyone has produced decent training texts that'd be a good start. I'd be happy to put a bit of effort into taking those texts and making a downloadable set for Master Key.

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    • From: Houston, Texas
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    28-Aug-2008 17:15:18#2 Re: Best typing tutor?

    I don't know about Master Key but I think you are not giving aTypeTrainer4Mac enough credit.  Reading the User Guide is useful. You can find links in the forum to useful texts like for example, the 100 most common English words.

    -------
    As you start using aTypeTrainer4Mac, there are 8 keys selected in the middle row of the keyboard and the level number is set to 4. Try to practice this first until level 16. Probably you need to customize the default levels scheme according to your keyboard layout. Thus, you can soon make yourself familiar with the most frequently used keys. Then you can start with some texts.

    When you want to train text files you will find some sample texts submitted together with the application. You can simply edit these files to customize them. To connect such a file, change to Select-mode and drag-and-drop the file onto the middle area of the window. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the text file onto the aTypeTrainer4Mac dock icon, or you can click Text and Connect a Text File... / Connect Recent in the menu bar.

    Of course you can produce text files yourself. Any text which you save as an RTF file can be handled like the sample texts mentioned above.

    Last edited by keyboard samurai (28-Aug-2008 17:18:52)

    http://DRCGH.com | http://texasiaido.com
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    28-Aug-2008 17:19:48#3 Re: Best typing tutor?

    Colemak forum kept crashing till I cut my post in half. 


    .....

    Using the first two options (Connect a Text File... and Connect Recent) you can connect a text file in RTF format to train with.

    Using an option from the next group (Connect Safari, Connect Firefox, Connect SeaMonkey, Connect Opera, Connect Navigator, Connect Flock, Connect Camino) you can retype a web-content from the front page opened in the corresponding web browser. You may connect to the same content, clicking the icon of the desired browser in the tool bar of the main window.

    Show / Hide Source Text shows or hides the previously connected text in the source text view.
    Last five options (Find in the Text..., Find Next, Find Previous, Copy from Text View, Paste to Find Panel) are active when being in the text view. Using them, you can find the desired fragment of the text. To begin retyping from the found position, you should click the Apply your selection button underneath the text view.

    http://DRCGH.com | http://texasiaido.com
    http://hi-games.net/profile/14

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    28-Aug-2008 22:05:18#4 Re: Best typing tutor?

    I like aTypingTutor4Mac, but it types gibberish by default. Other than that, it's good. The best typing test is the Ryan Heise typing test. It's a good length, easy to read, and gives you different text each time so you can do it a lot without seeing one thing too much.

    My typing speed record: http://hi-games.net/typing-test/watch?u=493

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    28-Aug-2008 22:25:50#5 Re: Best typing tutor?

    I think the point of the gibberish is to help initially get equally good memorization of the keyboard.  It's also real easy to select just certain keys to work on.   I think using something like a typing test to practice doesn't work so well till you really have memorized the keyboard.

    http://DRCGH.com | http://texasiaido.com
    http://hi-games.net/profile/14

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    28-Aug-2008 22:43:48#6 Re: Best typing tutor?

    Yeah, I'm not really interested in typing gibberish, I'm interested in learning to use my keyboard to type English. Much like you don't read words letter by letter I'd rather learn how to type sequences of things that make up words as a block, so learning how to type "rhfaii" (a Master Key special) doesn't interest me.

    Thanks to keyboard samurai - I went back and loaded my own texts into it. I took some online bigram (digraph) frequency info and split them into the top five, then the rest into two halves and made two sets for each: a repeated set (th th th th th ... he he he he ... etc) and then a shuffled set. It's just bigrams right now. It's annoying it doesn't read .txt files :-/ One cool thing is aTypeTrainer4Mac will make you type the sequence three times after making mistakes.

    What I really want though is something adaptive that gradually introduces letters, n-grams, and words depending on achieved results, in real time.

    **

    Some interesting results from the bigram experiment already: "er<space>" is really not comfortable for me. Also, the "th" and "he" bigrams being most common  in English by some margin not being on the home keys seems unfortunate but I'll reserve judgment 'til I've learned some more.

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