How to Learn Touch Typing — A 7-Day Roadmap Starting from Home Position

Before any of the daily drills, the load-bearing point: the difference between people who learn touch typing and people who give up isn't talent. It's almost always these two:

• 1. Don't break the order of key expansion

  Left home → right home → top row → bottom row. Skip a step or try every key at once and you'll burn out. Keep the order and a week is plenty.

• 2. 10–15 minutes a day, every day

  Daily reps beat a single weekend cram. Motor skills consolidate during sleep, so gaps cost you yesterday's gains.

If you follow those two rules, you don't need willpower. The Day 1–7 roadmap below just executes them as a concrete daily schedule.

Touch typing means typing without looking at the keyboard — eyes on the screen the whole time. The Japanese term “blind touch” is the same skill; the names come from different teaching traditions, but the technique is identical.

When you get it, three things follow:

• You stop looking down

  The screen ↔ keyboard ping-pong vanishes. Effective speed jumps 30–40% from just removing that cost.

• Finger travel is minimized

  Each finger has a lane, no random hand drift, much less fatigue over long sessions.

• Mistakes become legible

  “This word always trips me up” becomes “my right ring finger isn't moving.” Vague weaknesses become fixable weaknesses.

While you're still looking at the keys, none of those three are available to you. If you've felt a “want to get faster but can't” plateau, that's almost always the cause.

Spend five minutes on this before Day 1. Skipping setup means redoing it midway through the week.

• 1. Any keyboard works (laptop built-in is fine)

  Mechanical, membrane, laptop chiclet — all fine for learning. Don't postpone starting because you want to buy a new keyboard first. After a week of practice, you'll know your preferences anyway.

• 2. Chair height: elbows at about 90°

  Arms over-extended or pulled too close kills your ring and pinky reach. One adjustment now makes the next 7 days much easier.

• 3. Find the F and J bumps with your fingers

  The whole point of touch typing starts here. Both keys have small tactile bumps for the index fingers; the goal of Day 1 is to land on them with eyes closed.

At 10–15 minutes a day, this schedule builds touch typing in a week. Each day maps to the Typing Musou Home Position Dojo (100 stages, master-guided), Speed Trial or Mock Combat.

Don't reorder the days. The two failure modes I personally hit during my self-taught years were skipping home row to start higher, and trying to learn both hands on the same day — both cost me months of stalled progress.

Today is just this. Pinky on A, ring on S, middle on D, index on F, and index reaches G when needed. Thumb on Space. Don't move past this state until it feels effortless — if you do, things break by Day 5.

The check: can you find F's bump without looking? Eyes on the screen, left hand only.

Practice volumeThe home row opens with words built from the 5 left-home keys. Type them once, keeping finger discipline, and Day 1 is done.

Day 2 adds the right hand. Index on J (the bump), middle K, ring L, pinky ;. Mirror Day 1's drill: feel J's bump with eyes on the screen.

Right-home keys come up more often than left-home ones in Japanese romaji (k/h/m rows live here). Resist the urge to grab a neighbor with the wrong finger — that mistake snowballs.

Practice volumeThe right-home words use right-home + Day 1's left-home keys only. One clean run with correct fingers is enough for Day 2.

Two parts today: combined home-row drill, then your first measurement.

Words that bounce between left and right home are the foundation of real typing speed. If alternation feels jerky, no amount of single-hand drilling will fix it.

Then you measure. Typing Musou's Speed Trial is a time-attack against a 5,000 HP sandbag. It logs clear time, WPM, accuracy and best combo on every run. The wordlist is fixed (5 short / 10 medium / 5 long, 20 total), which means when you re-test on Day 7, you'll compare apples to apples.

Don't worry about which row of the WPM benchmark you land in — the point is having recorded a number. Day 3 plus Day 7 gives you two points on a line, which is what keeps motivation alive past week 1.

Practice volumeOnce the Dojo has you alternating left/right home keys word by word, the Speed Trial run becomes your week-1 benchmark.

Day 4 leaves home row for the first time. Important: only fingers move — not your wrist, not your whole hand. Curl the joint slightly upward to reach the key, release and let the finger fall back to home.

Left top row is E (middle), R and T (index), W (ring). In Japanese romaji these keys carry a huge chunk of common letters (て/と/わ patterns), so the stability you build today shows up everywhere later.

Practice volumeWork the words built around the 4 top-left keys. Hold the “reach + return” discipline and you're done.

Day 5 is the inflection point. Y·U·I·O·P unlocks the rest of the vowels — and the moment all five vowels are touch-typeable, more than half of romaji Japanese input goes off-eyes.

Heads-up: O (right ring) and P (right pinky) live at the edge of the board and feel far. Don't strain the fingers — let the whole hand slide slightly right, keep the wrist loose, and let the fingers reach. Wrist stiffness here kills the top row.

Practice volumeThe top-right range emphasizes vowel-heavy words. Getting through it means the five vowels are off-eyes — the half-way mark of touch typing.

Bottom row (N·M·B·Z·C and friends) is folded into last. Notice the motion: fingers curl inward at the second joint to drop down, not the whole hand. Wrist stays steady.

N and M are critical — Japanese romaji needs them constantly (「ん」, the m-row, multiple 「ん」 patterns). Solid right-index work on this row is what makes long passages feel stable.

Day 6 is a slightly bigger day: progress from the bottom row through the full-keyboard range in the Home Position Dojo. Once the all-keys stretch is cleared, meaningful everyday Japanese types across the whole keyboard — touch typing is roughly 90% there.

Practice volumeThe full-keyboard range spans the whole board with high-frequency Japanese words. Touch typing is essentially complete once it's off-eyes.

Final day, three steps: short sentences, long sentences, then Mock Combat (the CPU duel) to test the week's work in a real match.

The week-1 graduation test is Mock Combat's entry CPU, the Apprentice. It sits at WPM 30 with 85% accuracy — tuned so that a beginner who has put in the week can just barely win. Touch typers clear the bar, eye-typers don't. That's the entire point of Day 7.

Separately, if you keep going and finish all 100 stages of the Home Position Dojo, the final gate — the Gatekeeper (WPM 30) — opens. Beating the Gatekeeper grants the 「Master / 免許皆伝」 title. Treat 免許皆伝 not as the 7-day endpoint but as a longer goal you work toward afterward (the Apprentice and the Gatekeeper share the same spec: WPM 30 / 85% accuracy).

Once you beat the Apprentice, run Speed Trial one more time. Compare against your Day 3 reading — beginners typically gain +10 to +20 WPM in the week.

Practice volumeThe Apprentice is the WPM 30 / 85% accuracy entry CPU. Beating it is the finish line of the 7-day roadmap. Push further through all 100 dojo stages to reach the final Gatekeeper and earn 免許皆伝.

The 7 days build the foundation: eyes-on-screen typing. From here, the next month is about layering speed and accuracy on top of that foundation.

In my own experience, the month right after touch typing clicks is when WPM jumps the most — same practice time, but more of it sticks because nothing is bleeding into the screen-keyboard ping-pong anymore.

Run these three in parallel and a month later you're at a clearly higher tier:

• 1. Speed Trial 2–3× a week

  Continue logging WPM from Day 3 and Day 7 — same mode, week after week. The personal-best curve becomes the motivation engine.

• 2. Accuracy Trial once daily (no-miss)

  Speed work loosens fingers. The no-miss restart-on-error drill re-tightens them. One run a day, not optional.

• 3. CPU duels at the right difficulty

  Day 7's Apprentice sits at the bottom of the difficulty ladder. Pick one tier up, aim for a 60–70% win rate — the optimal pressure for improvement. Then graduate to ranked.

If you want the structured 1-month version, read 7 Tips to Get Faster at Typing — A 1-Month Practice Order. It connects directly from this article's Day 7 endpoint (beating the Apprentice).