Mark Rejhon
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The Thumb Touch Typist Guide (Type On Pager Without Looking!)
The BlackBerry Thumb Touch Typist Guide
(Thumb Typing without looking at keyboard!)
As a deaf user of electronics, keyboards are often the main method of keyboard communication. Some other other BlackBerry elites have mastered this technique, and I am posting the learning techniques for thumb touch typing. Very few thumb keyboards are good enough for thumb touch typing without looking at it, and BlackBerry is one of them.
This guide was originally designed for full QWERTY thumb keyboards; like BlackBerry 72XX series, rather than SureType on the 71XX series.
It will take approximately 1 month for most experienced desktop touchtypists to fully learn thumb touch typing. Some people manage to double their BlackBerry speed once they get familiar with blindly correcting typos, etc.
Advantages of Thumb Touch-Typing.
Thumb Touch Typing Learning Sequence
The BlackBerry Thumb Touch Typist Guide
(Thumb Typing without looking at keyboard!)
As a deaf user of electronics, keyboards are often the main method of keyboard communication. Some other other BlackBerry elites have mastered this technique, and I am posting the learning techniques for thumb touch typing. Very few thumb keyboards are good enough for thumb touch typing without looking at it, and BlackBerry is one of them.
This guide was originally designed for full QWERTY thumb keyboards; like BlackBerry 72XX series, rather than SureType on the 71XX series.
It will take approximately 1 month for most experienced desktop touchtypists to fully learn thumb touch typing. Some people manage to double their BlackBerry speed once they get familiar with blindly correcting typos, etc.
Advantages of Thumb Touch-Typing.
- Thumb type faster.
- You can look at the screen instead of the keyboard while typing.
- You can transcribe from hardcopy to BlackBerry faster.
- Become faster at correcting typos.
- People are impressed that you can type on your BlackBerry without looking at the thumb keyboard.
- Easily exceed 40 words per minute.
- A few people actually manage to thumb type as fast on BlackBerry as PC
- Some thumbtypists manage to exceed 70 WPM on BlackBerry. In the Dom Perignon III PDA speed-entry contest by Fitaly, a thumb touchtypist achieved 84 words per minute on a lower-quality TREO keyboard (old bigger size monochrome TREO, not the smaller TREO 600 which is even harder to thumb touch type on) -- and it's easier to thumb type faster on a BlackBerry.
Thumb Touch Typing Learning Sequence
- Be Able To Touchtype on Desktop PC first
First, you need to already be a touchtypist on the desktop PC keyboard. This makes it much easier to learn to thumb touch type on a handheld keyboard such as BlackBerry. A good place to practice and benchmark yourself is at http://www.typingtest.com which can also tell you how many WPM you are on the PC keyboard.
- Get familiar with the BlackBerry first
You need to be familiar with the BlackBerry even if you have to peek-and-poke. Become comfortable with it at first. Get familiar with sending and receiving emails on the BlackBerry.
- Memorize using backspace blindly
Always remember the backspace key is the rightmost key of the second row. It's easy to feel for the key. Try correcting your mistakes without staring at the backspace key anymore. Keep peek-and-poking, but never look at the backspace key again.
- Next, memorize using spacebar blindly
Always remember the spacebar is the bottommost middle key. Very easy to feel for the key. Stop staring at the spacebar anymore when you press it. Practice doing emails without ever looking at the spacebar and backspace key again. You will make many typos, but you've now already memorized the location of the backspace key; you can correct the error without staring at the backspace key.
- Finally, using Enter blindly
Always remember the Enter key is the rightmost key of the third row.. It's easy to feel for the key. Try correcting your mistakes without staring at the backspace key anymore. Keep peek-and-poking, but never look at the backspace key again.
- Memorize the two main home row keys. It is always the "F" and "J" keys.
Ever noticed why most PC keyboards have little bumps on the "F" and "J" keys? They help in locating your fingers on the home keys. It also happens that those are the most important locations to put your thumbs on for proper thumb touch typing position. Try blindly putting your left thumb on the "F" key and the right thumb on the "J" key without looking. Then look at the keyboard to see if you accurately put the thumbs on their correct locations. Repeat this step until successful at accurately putting the thumbs on the "F" and "J" keys.
- Practice.
Repeat steps #3, #4, #5, #6 again. You probably forgot at least one step (Everybody does, anyway, don't worry). Depending on how easy the steps are, you may need to practice for a few days before proceeding to the steps below. Some people only take 1 day to get to this step.
- Home row key touch typing
This is one of the most difficult steps for new thumb touch typists so take this step slowly. First of all, start to compose an email to yourself. It is okay to look at the keyboard until your cursor is already in the blank body of email message, waiting for you to type the message body. At that instant, immediately stop staring at the keyboard. Practice some simple typing tests that involves only the home row, as follows without looking at the keyboard. REMEMBER, if you make a typo, you already memorized the location of the backspace key. Practice this email message without ever looking at the thumb keyboard:
Your typing will be much slower initially. You will make lots of typos. Don't look at the keyboard if you make a typo; you can just use the backspace key blindly like you already learned. You'll soon naturally remember that if you accidentally typed an adjacent key, hit the backspace key immediately, and then try aiming for the key again. If you have difficulty, try moving your thumbs back to their home positions (F+J) and trying to aim for the letter again. You can keep repeating one of the above words over and over until you're thumbtouchtyping the word, then you can move on to the next word. Do not worry, just keep practicing every day in the week. Keep repeating a few times per day until you're comfortable typing home row text. (Note: I actually skipped this step myself when practicing, some people prefer to go directly to the next step, but it's more frustrating if you skip the homerow practice step)
- Sequential keypress typing exercise
As always, just like a desktop keyboard, you can:
Remember that first row of key is QWERTYUIOP
Remember that second row of keys is ASDFGHJKL
Remember that third row is ZXCVBNM
Blindly type this email message to yourself without looking at the keyboard at all:
This is fairly easy since this is just keypresses from the left to the right. But remember: left thumb for left half, right thumb for right half. But you will accidentally hit other keys when you try to do this for the first time. So keep practicing the above email message until you you stopped accidentally hitting ALT(moon), shift, CAP, Enter, SYM, or DEL/backspace. Don't forget you've already memorized the backspace key, so make sure not to look at the keyboard when correcting mistakes. Another purpose of this exercise is to memorize the locations of the beginning and end of each row of keys, so you don't accidentally hit the "SYM" key instead of "M" and you don't accidentally hit the ALT(moon) key instead of "Z". A good practice email is also:
You will notice this is a frustrating exercise, because you will accidentially hit adjacent keys, but this is a useful exercise to avoid hitting nearby non-letter keys.
- Common letters typing exercise
Now, compose yourself an email message (WITH NO PUNCTUATION) and resist staring at the keyboard. As before, you already remember the location of the backspace key without needing to stare at the keyboard. If you pressed the wrong key, correct without looking. At first, you can blindly aim for the general location of the key, so if you accidentally hit "E" when trying to hit "W", you know the aim your thumb a little bit more to the side on the next thumb touch type attempt of that key. Do about 1 practice exercise per day, such waiting on the bus/train. It will take at least a week to complete the below. Now practice this email on the 1st day
2nd day practice
3rd day practice:
4th day practice:
5th day practice: Do some random sentence practice of common words. Read the advertisements or an email or a document nearby and repeat one sentence from it, over and over.
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