12 ms·
Practice typing by retyping entire novels
- weeksie 4y agoSimilar but for the emacs users https://github.com/dakra/speed-type https://github.com/dakra/speed-type
- neilv 4y agoWould it be useful to use typing practice as a way to crowdsource scanned print publications better than OCR? (Do the OCR, and see whether a few human samples "vote" better text? Then maybe also use that to improve the OCR?)
- Gigachad 4y agoOCR is probably a solved problem at this point and anything unscannable is going to have errors with human typists too.
- neilv 4y agoI've been seeing imperfect OCR. And you can "vote" (like a voting configuration of redundant devices, on the assumption the majority is correct) among multiple typists.
- adamckay 4y agoThis is what the old CAPTCHA system from Google did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA#ReCAPTCHA_v1_(human-assisted_OCR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA#ReCAPTCHA_v1_(human-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smegsicle 4y agoi feel like many typing tutors allow you to import lessons as text files?
- serial_dev 4y agoThey do, but this simplifies the process significantly. Think of it as a purpose built variant of typing apps. You can also do many things on Excel or Word, but sometimes it's more convenient to perform some tasks with a purpose-built app that is built for your problem domain. I'll give this a try for sure when I'm on my computer.
- behringer 4y agoI learned typing by typing song lyrics as they played. You either keep up or you get to keep rewinding.
- Gatsky 4y agoHey, that’s a good idea! Keyboard Karaoke!
- PostOnce 4y agoI bet this works wonders for retention. It might be a great way to study many subjects.
- PherricOxide 4y agoI haven’t worried much about my typing speed in years (100WPM is faster than I can think when coding or writing most of the time), but I am learning German and wonder if typing massive amounts of text in a language you’re trying to learn could have some benefits?
- fullmoon 4y agoAccording to Krashen's language acquisition models only input matters, and typing is a very ineffective mode of reading.
- kqr 4y ago> I haven’t worried much about my typing speed in years (100WPM is faster than I can think when coding or writing most of the time), I hear this argument all the time and I don't buy it. Yes, my thinking is slower than 100 wpm on average, but it is extremely bursty. It goes at 0 wpm most of the time then 10000 wpm for short intervals. I believe the fundamental concern here is not average speed, but latency. How fast can you get the current thought onto the page so that your brain can move on to think about the next thing? I also type at 100 wpm, and I find my wetware CPU experiences stalled cycles while I'm typing, not able to continue because it needs to hold on to a buffer containing the thought I'm slowly typing out.
- szundi 4y agoMine is 0 wpm most of the time, but there are nanoseconds when it is almost infinite wpm.
- LoganDark 4y agoWe type at something like 150 wpm casually and our brain is still a bit faster... although we've been optimizing it to type out chat messages for years, so that's probably why we can come up with them with such ease
- tmtvl 4y agoWhat kind of keyboard do you have that polls at such a rate that it can keep up with "almost infinite" (whatever that means) WPM? The best keyboards I have found only have 1000Hz scan rate, which in the absolute best case means only 30,000 WPM. Granted, compared to infinity, every number is equidistant, but when you say "almost infinite" I expect something a bit more impressive (in the 10**80 range, for example).
- ljf 4y agoThe site seems to have been hugged to death, so in the mean time this article may be of interest to you: https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-out-the-great-gatsby-farewell-to-arms.html https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-... Hunter S. Thompson Typed Out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learning How to Write Like the Masters
- mylons 4y agoas well as heart of darkness. he did it more than once. the quote/paraphrase attributed to Hunter on this that I love is, "I wanted to know what it felt like to write something good." edit: I was oddly talking about this today to my partner. I've honestly never heard of anyone doing it outside of Hunter.. but that might just be because Hunter mentioned it in such a cool way.
- mosselman 4y agoI sometimes read to fall asleep. Usually I am already tired so I can get though 1-3 pages per session. I started the count of monte cristo not knowing it was about 2000 pages, so that’s what I read for the whole of 2019 basically. At least when going to bed. Typing it completely seems like a huge undertaking.
- vivegi 4y agoI can relate. I am actually translating The Count of Monte Cristo. Completed 5 chapters so far. Still a loooooooong way to go.
- zbiku 4y agoOut of curiosity, why are you doing this?
- vivegi 4y agoJust replied in the comment above. This is more as an intellectual curiosity. I intend to publish it eventually as a bi-lingual ebook with para by para translations. Hopefully, it is useful for those who are learning one of the languages and is not a native speaker/writer of the other.
- mosselman 4y agoThat seems like an even grander endeavour. What are you translating it to? From which language?
- vivegi 4y agoEnglish to Tamil. It is a huge endeavour. I am not using any automated translations except to find esoteric translations (using Google Translate). Many idioms and phrases also have to be localized, so it is an intellectual challenge. Alexander Dumas' writing is also quite beautiful and even in the limited number of chapters I have completed translating there are some excellent narratives. I am enjoying it. My idea is to eventually publish it as a bi-lingual ebook, perhaps it would help people who are learning English/Tamil.
- ngneer 4y agoNeat. I coded a similar idea for fun, back when Java Applets still roamed the earth. The backend would harvest Project Gutenberg files and the frontend would present those to the user.
- giardia 4y agoThis is how I would practice writing shorthand. It's good too because you can practice reading what you wrote a few weeks later (this is as important as writing tbh), and if you really fucked up you can go back and see what the word was supposed to be.
- arbitrandomuser 4y agoI can type at a decent pace as long as it's text ; I learnt to type on gtypist . (I haven't completed all of them just the basics and some drills) . Typing for programming is a whole lot different , and I find myself fumbling around numbers and special characters often
- psychphysic 4y agoSimilarly, unless you're copying code from a magazine like the good old days. Writing code is limited by the pace of you being able to think up sound effective code. I can't recall where I saw it but believe I heard a rule of thumb of only 40wpm pretty much mazing out most people's ability to write code.
- sverhagen 4y agoYou'll get to your ten or twelve lines of code per day real fast then. What you gonna do with the rest of your time? Reference: The Internet (For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/966800 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/966800) --- Sure, code written (and rewritten) (and deleted) versus net output. But maybe be more thoughtful, do less than 40wpm, and write a better solution overall.
- psychphysic 4y agoThat's a good point! I think the point is 40wpm allows you to code. If you wrote at 10 lines per day, 80 char per line works out to 0.0333wpm. You'll forget what you're doing by the time get a word out. As in once you hit 40wpm you won't be slowed by your typing as you try to code. (WPM is characters per minute over 5, i.e. assumes average word is 5 chars long).
- eyuelt 4y agoYou may be interested in typing.io, which is specifically for code. I don't think it'll help much with numbers though. Personally, I've never gotten the hang of touch typing the number row, so I use the numpad instead.
- atomicnature 4y agoI learned touch typing this way in my childhood. I digitised 7-8 novels (Heidi, Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock Holmes, etc), and it was great fun :) PS: I didn't measure my speed back then, but it definitely worked. I go at 90+ wpm these days without a sweat!
- powersnail 4y agoWhen I practice typing and make an error, I thought that perhaps it should automatically go back to the beginning of the word. Because the road leading to fast typing is to type letters in groups, and having the muscle memories of common words might help with both speed and accuracy. The statistics could include frequently mistyped pairs and triplets, or basically, ngrams. And you can practice those in isolation. It will be like scale practicing of musical instrument.
- danuker 4y agoYou can do that with Ctrl+Backspace. Or Ctrl+Left if you just want to move.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThis is a very desirable action. Once you get some speed up touch-typing you ( I still do ) fluff whole words. Infuriated by an emacs not having an ergonomic offering I bound M-w to backward-kill-word and found it so useful it's still in my .emacs file.
- LoganDark 4y ago> Once you get some speed up touch-typing you ( I still do ) fluff whole words. Same. For some reason we always mix up "you" and "the", even though they are completely different words
- smeej 4y agoThis might be something you would actually overcome as you build up even more speed by focusing on learning to correct the individual letters. I've been typing 120+ wpm for 20 years and it's actually surprising to me that this is a problem people have. It's that foreign to my experience. I could be totally wrong. It could just be that typing happens in different ways in different people's brains and bodies and that's why I can't relate to this, but I'd challenge you to try correcting the letters rather than the words and see if that doesn't have a compounding effect on improving your speed.
- jacquesm 4y ago
- idoubtit 4y agoOn this site, I opened a book at random and was surprised to see several errors in the text. For instance, a full stop was clearly missing in the first line. So I checked the source, which seems to be gutenberg.org (the site has no reference at a book level, but mentions some sources on the front page). Yet the same book (Botchan) on Project Gutenberg does not have these errors. So I'd suggest two enhancements to the author. Firstly, for each book, state the exact source, including the retrieval date. Then make sure that the up to date version of each book is used. I also wonder if there could be a way to make all this typing more useful. There are so many books lacking OCR, or lacking review after a poor OCR.
- newaccount2021 4y ago[dead]
- alex_suzuki 4y agoThis sounds like a great way to practice, but my RSI probably wouldn’t like it much. :-(
- adammarples 4y agoI heard of a man who tried to rewrite the Quixote once, re-creating it, line for line
- FounderBurr 4y agoI’ve always wanted to pay $5/mo to type things.
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago"Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough-he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided-word for word and line for line-with those of Miguel de Cervantes. ... Initially, Menard's method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918-be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeenth-century Castilian) but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote-that looked to Menard less challenging (and there- fore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." ~ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Borges) https://www.jenliu.info/DIAP/Borges-Pierre-Menard_text.pdf https://www.jenliu.info/DIAP/Borges-Pierre-Menard_text.pdf
- bangkoksbest 4y agoI also immediately thought of Borges on reading the link's title. When I was learning Spanish in adulthood, I decided for practice to re-translate this Borges story back into Spanish, having never read it in the original. Incredibly challenging (for such a beginner), but also very amusing to see the overlaps and the differences.
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoBe aware that RSI is a real risk and once you have it, it never goes away. That is serious, even critical, if your job is at the keyboard. So be moderate.
- cainxinth 4y agoIt’s also manageable. I recommend gyroscopic exercise balls.
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoThey help me now my RSI is much better, but nothing is as good as Don't Get RSI In The First Place. It's a nasty bitch.
- jacquesm 4y agoIt is, but given the repetitive nature of almost any job avoiding RSI in the longer term is pretty much impossible nowadays, unless you intend to avoid having jobs for longer than a few months.
- makeset 4y agoNever is a strong word- mine went away. I had debilitating carpal tunnel RSI, and with the right ergonomics (*) it went away completely in a few months, and no sign of it for the couple of decades since, still using a keyboard for most of my waking hours. I’d say time spent typing is much less of a factor than how that typing is done. (*) The first big fix for me was switching from a desk to laptop on a couch where I could change positions every few minutes. The short travel and light weight of laptop keys also helped. I switched back to a desk more recently, but I kept the low-profile light keys, and the general awareness of postural stress.
- _a_a_a_ 4y ago"mine went away" - That's not my experience but yours is a good counterpoint. I'm glad you're free of it.
- joe__f 4y agoIs this a joke? Why would anyone want to use this?
- vehemenz 4y agoThere are people out there who don't know how to type properly, though I'm not sure if they'd be reading much HN. Most Americans under 40 would have learned touch typing in grade school.
- joe__f 4y agoYeah, I learnt touch typing as a teenager with no instruction and as far as I'm aware most of my friends also did. My mum used to type with one finger at that time but I think by now even she would struggle to find a use for this tool
- Zvez 4y ago>Most Americans under 40 would have learned touch typing in grade school That's interesting. Do they really use it though? What I can see from other part of the world that even developers don't use it.
- chauchakching 4y agothe dark theme color contrasts hurt my eyes
- lajosbacs 4y agoDoes not seem to work with DVORAK.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tmtvl 4y agoI use the Dvorak layout and have no issues on the site. I am accessing it through Firefox under OpenSUSE, though, so it may be an issue with your browser?
- gtgsetgse 4y agoThere is an awesome app called type-fu (type-fu dot com) which uses words, proverbs, quotes, facts, and code as typing material just as some users in the comments requested. It has many layouts, including dvorak, workman, norman, etc., and online version seems to be free.
- armchairhacker 4y agoSomeone should hook this up to train an ML like which “types out a sequence of words for a human” It’s a really small, dumb improvement but it’s something ML would be useful for and you probably won’t need much data to produce something reasonable. Current “simulated typing” looks clearly simulated, as every letter has an even delay and humans don’t type evenly (e.g. I’m sure repeat letters are typed faster)
- Zvez 4y agohttps://github.com/jankrepl/mltype https://github.com/jankrepl/mltype is something like this. It is tuned for programmers though. And the quality of generated text might vary a lot. But it gives reasonable char sequences.
- bb88 4y agoThis is very clever. I could see this being an 8th grade typing project where the class types out a chapter, but with the ability to remove the backspace behavior. It would be a subversive way to get students to read literature...
- ozim 4y agoThat would be great subversive way to get myself to read classics finally.
- bb88 4y agoI was thinking about that myself. Frankly you start on a chapter one and see if you like it, then read the rest. I was surprised about how much I liked the first few pages of 1984 -- which was written around 80 years ago.
- rvba 4y agoLong time ago I really liked https://play.typeracer.com/ https://play.typeracer.com/ On thay site you can race against other players (or bots?). There were also those programs that could teach you how to type with 10 fingers, but they were very boring. The one I remember would start by teaching you 2 character combinations (like gh zo wm er jk) what was very dull.
- alfanick 4y agoThat’s how I learned to type on a computer keyboard when I was 4yo, some 26 years ago - just rewrite some printed books on a text editor. Highly recommended.
- 2-718-281-828 4y agoBut does this really also help one to improve one's literary skills?
- davisoneee 4y agoI have recently started trying to learn colemak[^3], and came across the great cross-platform tool Amphetype[^1]. You can load in whatever document you want as a source, and it'll randomly select chunks of whatever size you want (i.e. about 200 words-worth). It then gives you analysis of your performance, as well as breaking down what trigrams and words cause you the most trouble. Combine this with ngram training to get the muscle memory of the most common chunks of english and you can really quickly improve your fluency [^2]. 1: https://gitlab.com/franksh/amphetype https://gitlab.com/franksh/amphetype 2: https://ranelpadon.github.io/ngram-type/ https://ranelpadon.github.io/ngram-type/ 3: https://gnusenpai.github.io/colemakclub/ https://gnusenpai.github.io/colemakclub/
- vlmutolo 4y agoDo you use Vim or a modal editor? I’ve been considering switching to Colemak, but I can’t figure out how I’d get past the fact that hjkl would be in a different spot. I could change the shortcuts in software, but then it starts a cascade of changed shortcuts. Plus, I could then only use software that I’ve specifically configured. How do you SSH into a server?
- micimize 4y agoThis is a pretty unavoidable downside of alt keyboard layouts. For vim you'd probably want a plugin like https://github.com/jooize/vim-colemak https://github.com/jooize/vim-colemak. If you maintain your QWERTY muscle memory, you can use it as a fallback in foreign environments, but figuring out how to smoothly setup RC files on any target is probably the ideal: https://serverfault.com/questions/400522/how-to-use-a-custom-bashrc-file-on-ssh-login https://serverfault.com/questions/400522/how-to-use-a-custom... Personally. I gave up on Dvorak in part due to this friction when I started introducing more and more tools like Vimperator (Firefox plugin, superseded by Tridactyl) into my workflow. The flexibility of switching on a vim mode anywhere and having it be 95% what I want is very high. The other factor was I still did a lot of same-machine peering then, which it added a lot of friction to. I do know highly capable engineers who go fully down the typing-ergonomics rabbit hole and stay there, but it does consume a fair amount of one's yak-shaving budget.
- lebaux 4y agoor write a blog
- guerrilla 4y agoI love this, but I wish there were some of these books in other languages. I think it could help language learning a lot!
- Nemo_bis 4y agoEven better, type a public domain novel into Wikisource! https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Beginner%27s_guide_to_proofreading https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Beginner%27s_guide_to_pr...
- scarface74 4y agoI’m going to give what I know is an unpopular opinion and then I’m going to contradict myself. Your typing speed has no affect on your ability to be a good developer. While I don’t “hunt and peck” and I can type without looking at the keyboard most of the time, I physically can’t touch type. I type with one hand and I’ve been programming since 1986 as a hobbyist for 10 years and then a professional. Last time I checked, I typed at about 45 wpm. Most of my professional career though I’ve used statically typed language and from 2010-2020 mostly C# with JetBrains R# - with excellent shortcuts and autocomplete. I just started working on my first project with the assistance of ChatGPT. It’s amazing how well it does at taking regular English sentences and writing and modifying Python and JavaScript code - even less typing.
- nouveaux 4y ago"Your typing speed has no affect on your ability to be a good developer." I think you mean to say that your ability to type at 45 wpm has a minimal impact on your ability to be a good developer. To me, 45 wpm is moderate but not slow. I have seen developers who type at around 10-15 wpm. I have noticed that developers who are slower typers are more likely to fight back on simple changes and writing documentation. It just takes them more time to do the same amount of work that a faster typist will take. In my experience, slow typer are great at reasoning about the code base and coming up with designs in their head, but poor at writing code and communicating with text either through email/slack or documentation. People who are not fast typist can be very smart but will always be at a disadvantage when it comes to using the keyboard. > nouveaux
- scarface74 4y agoRefactoring is also where statically typed languages combined with good IDEs that have a large set of automated provable correct refactoring shortcuts come in. Also, I type a lot faster on my phone than a keyboard. I met my manager for the first time in person a year after he became my manager (Covid travel restrictions). In our first team meeting, I mentioned that if he sees my typing on my phone a lot it’s because I am on Slack talking to my coworkers or customers (I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech specializing in cloud application development and “DevOps”). As far as documentation, my job requires a lot of writing. For my current project I’m writing a lot of small one off Python scripts. You would be surprised how well ChatGPT can “explain” what a script involving AWS automation does in plain English and I can even ask it “Why would I use this” and it often gives me a good enough bottom line up front summary.
- ghastmaster 4y agoI switched to dvorak from querty. At the time, the only typing I did of any length was in chat on Diablo 1. I have never felt so impotent as when I was frantically trying to convey information in game during that early period. Trying to keep up with conversations in the channels was very frustrating. I improved my wpm not by switching to dvorak, but by learning the new layout without looking at the keyboard while I type.
- spratzt 4y agoWhy would anybody want to become an expert typist in 2023? Modern speech to text is just so good.
- Cupertino95014 4y agoI think I read once that Joan Didion practiced typing the opening of A Farewell to Arms just to get Hemingway's voice into her head.
- anuvrat1 4y agoTyping whole novels is a bit too much for me, as I lose interest in 20 mins or a day or two at best, so short content like articles and blogs would be much better.
- theptip 4y agoI like this approach; for programming you want something like typing.io to type existing software. I find most of the accuracy in coding is being able to type operators and brackets and such, which don’t feature in normal text. Practicing on code sounds dumb because you could just write code, but I find drilling this way to be really helpful as you can just focus all your attention on training accuracy. (Added benefit - you perhaps subconsciously memorize your frameworks code if you use, say, Django to practice your Python.)
- PaulHoule 4y agoReminds me of the 1980s where people would type in BASIC programs out of magazines.
- Qahlel 4y ago3 weeks ago, I had just bought a mechanical keyboard for the first time in my life. I didn't have a chance to use it properly until I found out about this site. Thank you.
- schnika 4y agoHow funny. When I was around 10 my mother sent my sister and me to a 10 finger typing class. We had to practice at home so I started retyping the first Harry Potter novel which was my favourite book during that time. It was after 100 or 200 pages when I left everyone I know behind in terms of speed and accuracy. Every time I switch my keyboard I am doing a lite version of and retype only a couple of pages in order to adjust my muscles to the new layout.
- tmtvl 4y agoTypelit introduced me to Maurice Leblanc's Lupin books, which are an absolute treat to read (and quite fun to type out as well). It's nice to have something interesting to type out when learning/practising proper home-row 10-finger typing (which is why I wound up learning Dvorak typing, as KTouch has a really good course for it).
- WalterBright 4y agoI thought this must be ridiculous. But it's actually pretty cool! Had some fun with it.
- szastamasta 4y agoThis is a really cool site. I’ve been using it extensively when learning to touch type. It’s maybe less efficient, but much more enjoyable than plain typing exercises. Shameless plug: I’ve also made a somewhat similar site: https://typingtool.app/ https://typingtool.app/ because I didn’t really like the look of it.
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- cafard 4y agoA shirt-tail relative started to type out the Bible, though last I heard she had bogged down somewhere around Ecclesiastes. If memory serves, she did this with some of the Game of Thrones books also. I don't know what she learned about religion or the techniques of the fantasy novel, or whether this made her a better typist.