How to Get Faster at Typing — A Map of the Practice Order

If you are unsure, think through these three in order.

• 1. Press the same key with the same finger every time

  This is the first movement shared by fast typists. Practicing with fixed finger assignments is one way to build it. If you are not used to typing, start here.

• 2. Find where you are slow, and fix that spot

  Slowness is not spread evenly; it is concentrated. In Typing Musou's records, over half of the time went to the boundaries between kana.

• 3. Split practice up, and keep going

  There is an experiment showing that for the same total practice time, spreading it out gives more learning than massing it. How long it takes cannot be promised as 'a month'.

Lining these three up against the Dojo menu gives the 'practice order' below. If you can already type, you may skip the first half.

A study from Aalto University in Finland (Feit et al., 2016) examined 30 people who type in different ways, using motion capture and other methods, while they typed English or Finnish sentences. The participants were chosen to span 34–79 WPM. Regardless of how many fingers they used, some people exceeded 70 WPM. Even some who used only one or two fingers per hand reached that speed. Only 13 of the 30 said they were touch typists (people who type with all ten fingers).

The study named three predictors of high speed.

• The same letter is always pressed by the same finger

  The mapping between letters and fingers stays consistent.

• The next keystroke is prepared ahead of time

  The movement for the next key begins while the current key is still being typed.

• The whole hand does not move much

  The fingertips do the typing, and the hand itself is not moved around too much.

An online study of about 170,000 people (Dhakal et al., 2018) also found that people who had taken a typing course were on average about 5 WPM faster. The spread was about 20 WPM, so differences between individuals were much larger than the difference between the groups.

So 'self-taught typing always hits a ceiling' and 'looking at the keyboard keeps you slow' cannot be claimed. What can be said is that self-taught typists tend to spend more time looking at the keyboard. Practicing with fixed finger assignments still makes sense, because the first predictor is exactly that. But no study says it is the only way.

The 'practice order' in the next chapter has not been confirmed to work by research. It is the developer's proposal, following the structure of the Dojo.

I found no experiment comparing practice orders. If you already type in your own way, you may skip stages 1 and 2 and start at stage 3.

• 1. Fix your finger assignments

  Home position is the resting place where your index fingers sit on F and J (many keyboards have small bumps there) and your other fingers line up beside them. Fingers leave from there and return after typing. It is the base for pressing the same key with the same finger. For a diagram, see Home Position Illustrated; for how to learn typing without looking, see How to Learn Touch Typing. The Home Position Dojo has 150 stages in 15 chapters, and clearing a stage opens the next.

• 2. Build kana from romaji

  Japanese is typed by turning kana into a sequence of Latin letters (romaji). か is K then A. Some kana have more than one spelling; し can be typed as si or shi. Typing Musou accepts any of them, so use the spelling that is easy for you. In Typing Musou's records, combined sounds (きゃ = kya) and the small っ draw more mistakes than plain kana: about 36 and 35 mistakes per 100 appearances, against about 20 for plain kana. Chapters 5–6 of the Dojo build familiarity. You can check spellings in the romaji chart.

• 3. Measure

  Turn speed into a number. WPM is correctly typed keystrokes ÷ 5 ÷ minutes. The Speed Trial is a mode where you score by damage dealt to a sandbag in 60 seconds, and the result shows WPM and accuracy. It is not a screen made only for measuring WPM. To see where you stand, compare with the distribution of people who played the game in Average WPM and Benchmarks.

• 4. Fix the slow spots and mistake types

  Slowness is not spread evenly; it was concentrated at the boundaries between kana (see the 'Real data' section). To learn your mistake types, the Accuracy Drill, where you must finish 10 words without a mistake, helps. Chapters 11–15 of the Home Position Dojo were built around the stumbling points that were most common in an analysis of keystroke records (September 2026): small ゃ/ゅ/ょ, dakuten, っ and ん, neighboring keys and double presses, and the boundaries between kana. When progress stalls, see Why Your Typing Isn't Getting Faster; for many mistakes, see How to Reduce Typing Mistakes.

• 5. Stay steady in real matches

  I think what you can do in practice and what you can do in a tense moment are different things. That is the developer's view, not something research confirmed. Mock Combat is the Dojo where you fight CPUs. Stage 1 is 5 WPM, each stage is 3 WPM stronger, and stage 100 is 300 WPM. Winning opens the next stage. Random Battle is a rated match with automatic matchmaking against other players. If no opponent is found, a CPU built from real players' records becomes your opponent, and it also counts for rating.

Two results from Typing Musou's records (June–October 2026). They cover players who allowed research use and exclude students who joined a school class. Plays with accuracy of 70% or below were not recorded. This is a record of people who played a game, not a trend among all people in Japan. These are correlations, not causes.

The boundary between kana is about 40% of keystrokes but takes 55.5% of the time, with an interval about 2.5 times that inside a kana. Time spent reading the next word is also included in the boundary. Of the difference between skill bands, 49–65% came from boundaries getting faster.

From this I split the records of 14,576 players into skill bands and estimated the room for improvement for intermediate typists, taking the middle person of the 45–60 WPM band (about 50 WPM). If only the boundaries became as fast as the next band up, they would reach about 58 WPM. Halving mistakes gives about 52.5 WPM, and removing mistakes entirely about 54–55 WPM. In the 60–80 WPM band (about 65–66 WPM), removing mistakes gives about 72 WPM, a gain of about 6.

This does not mean reducing mistakes is pointless. The faster you get, the larger the share of mistakes. But for intermediate typists, the estimate says there is more room in bringing the links between kana up to the next band's level than in eliminating mistakes. It is an 'if this happened' calculation, not a measurement of the effect of practice. Whether 'accuracy is the foundation of speed' can be stated outright cannot be decided from this record.

Most of the gain came from shorter intervals between keys. In particular, the time to the first consonant of a kana became about 12–20% shorter. The share of mistakes hardly changed.

Playing a lot alone does not seem to lower the mistake rate much. If you want fewer mistakes, the developer's view is to add practice that looks at your mistake types, separate from simply typing a lot.

Guidelines like 'a foundation in a month' or 'a change in 2–4 weeks with 10 minutes a day' have not been confirmed by research. Here is the range research can support.

• Spreading practice out gives more learning per hour

  In an experiment (Baddeley & Longman, 1978), 72 post office employees aged 19–46 trained on a typewriter to type alphanumeric codes. The group with one 1-hour session a day learned most efficiently, and the group with two 2-hour sessions a day learned least efficiently. But the shortest unit was one hour. I found no study that directly tested 5–15 minute sessions.

• Learning every key from scratch took roughly 35–50 hours (approximate)

  In the same experiment, this is the training time it took people who had never used a typewriter to learn the whole keyboard. It was not an experiment on Japanese romaji typing. At 15 minutes a day, that would be roughly 140–200 days. It does not apply to people who can already type in their own way.

• Reaching expert speed takes hundreds of hours

  The paper by Feit et al., citing other literature, says that reaching the speeds reported for touch typing requires hundreds of hours of deliberate training.

In our own records, as the table in the 'Real data' section shows, people who continued 100+ games gained 12% and those who continued 300+ games gained 20%. These are records of people who continued. That short, spread-out practice is easier to keep up is the developer's advice. No study says 10–15 minutes is optimal.

Where to look depends on how progress stopped.

• Speed has stalled

  Start by suspecting the boundaries between kana. Over half of the time goes there, and in the estimate for intermediate typists, shortening them left more room than eliminating mistakes (see the 'Real data' section). It is not a study of what causes plateaus, though. For details, see Why Your Typing Isn't Getting Faster.

• Too many mistakes

  Mistakes come in types: neighboring keys, ordering accidents within a kana, double presses and so on. How to Reduce Typing Mistakes sorts them out.

• Stalling on numbers and symbols

  If you are fast on text but stall on numbers and symbols, you can practice just those. See Typing Numbers and Symbols.

• Ring or little finger will not move well

  Fingers differ in how independently they can move. See Practice for Ring and Little Fingers.

• Q. How long does it take to get faster at typing?

  'A month' cannot be promised. In research, people learning a keyboard for the first time needed roughly 35–50 hours of training to learn every key. Some literature says expert speed takes hundreds of hours. In Typing Musou's records, people who continued 100+ Random Battle games gained 12% in WPM on average (records of people who continued only).

• Q. Can I not get faster without learning home position?

  It cannot be said that you cannot. In research, even self-taught typists using only one or two fingers per hand sometimes exceeded 70 WPM. Still, the first thing fast typists share is pressing the same letter with the same finger, so practicing with fixed finger assignments makes sense.

• Q. Does practicing with a game really make me faster?

  I found no study that directly tested the game format. In Typing Musou's records, people who continued got faster, but those are records of people who continued, and people who improve easily may be over-represented. I think whether you keep going matters more than the format (the developer's view).

• Q. Can I practice for free? Does it work on a phone?

  Typing Musou is free and shows no ads. All features work without logging in. You can play on a computer, or a tablet with an external keyboard connected. It cannot be typed on an on-screen keyboard, and the game screens do not open on a phone (the official site and this guide can be read on a phone).

Fast typists share three movements: pressing the same letter with the same finger, preparing the next keystroke ahead of time, and not moving the whole hand much. Since self-taught typists can exceed 70 WPM, 'self-taught typing always hits a ceiling' cannot be claimed.

The practice order is finger assignments, romaji, measuring, fixing and real matches. Research has not confirmed the order; it is the developer's proposal following the Dojo. In real data, over half of the time went to the boundaries between kana, and with continued play speed rose while the mistake rate did not change. The time it takes cannot be promised as 'a month'.

Start by finding where you are stalling. If you are not used to typing, begin in the Home Position Dojo. If you can already type, start by measuring your speed in the Speed Trial.

I checked the research against the papers below (checked October 18, 2026). The Typing Musou records are my own tally (October 18, 2026; only players who allowed research use).

1. Feit, Weir, Oulasvirta. How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing. CHI 2016 — 30 people spanning 34–79 WPM, three movements that predict high speed, self-taught typists exceeding 70 WPM
2. Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson, Oulasvirta. Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. CHI 2018 — an online study of about 168,000 people; those who had taken a typing course were about 5 WPM faster on average; spread of about 20 WPM
3. Baddeley, Longman. The Influence of Length and Frequency of Training Session on the Rate of Learning to Type. Ergonomics 21(8), 1978 — post office employees; one 1-hour session a day was most efficient and two 2-hour sessions least; training hours to learn the whole keyboard (about 35–50)
4. Pan, Rickard. Sleep and motor learning: Is there room for consolidation? Psychological Bulletin 141(4), 2015 — a meta-analysis of 34 studies; no evidence that sleep enhances motor learning, and whether it stabilizes memory cannot be determined