Thai touch typing for beginners

What touch typing is, and why it is worth it

In touch typing every finger owns a group of keys, and your hands learn the positions by feel instead of by sight. Your eyes can stay on the screen or on the text you are copying. Two-finger typists hit a ceiling because they keep switching their eyes between the keys and the screen; touch typists keep a steady rhythm for longer and tire less.

Thai has more characters than English: consonants, vowels, tone marks and Thai digits, so it uses Shift more often. That sounds hard, but nearly all of the most frequent characters sit on the unshifted layer. Build a solid home row first and the rest follows.

Set up your posture and keyboard

• Chair and desk: sit back against the chair with your feet flat. Elbows at about 90 degrees, level with the keyboard or slightly above it.
• Wrists: float them just above the keys. Do not press them into the desk edge while typing; use a wrist rest only when you pause.
• Fingers: naturally curved, as if holding a small ball, touching the keys lightly with the fingertips.
• Screen: top edge at or slightly below eye level, about an arm's length away.
• Keyboard: any standard keyboard with bumps on F and J, with Thai set to the Kedmanee layout in your operating system.

The home row and where your fingers rest

The home row is the middle row where your eight fingers rest before and after every key press. On Kedmanee the left hand rests on ฟ ห ก ด and the right hand on ่ า ส ว. Both thumbs rest on the space bar.

ด and ่ (mai ek, the first tone mark) sit on F and J, which have small bumps for your index fingers. Whenever you lose your place, find the bumps with your index fingers and let the other fingers fall in line. You will be back in position in a fraction of a second.

The Kedmanee home row is full of very common letters, such as ก ด า ส ว ห and mai ek, so you can type real words from day one: กา, ดาว, สาว, หา and ว่า.

Which finger presses which key

Each finger covers a slanted column above and below its home key. The index fingers take two columns each because they are the strongest; the right little finger covers the most keys.

For shifted characters, press the Shift key on the opposite hand. To type ฤ (Shift + ฟ, left little finger), hold right Shift with your right little finger. The full two-layer map is in our Kedmanee layout guide.

Step by step

1. Place your fingers and find the bumps. Put your index fingers on ด and ่ and let the rest follow. Close your eyes and do it ten times until it is instant.
2. Master the home row without looking. Type home-row drills and short words until you are at least 90 percent accurate.
3. Add the top row a pair of keys at a time. Start with keys your index fingers reach, such as พ ะ ั ี, then ไ ำ ร น ย บ ล. Return to the home row after every press.
4. Add the bottom row. Practise อ ิ ื ท ม ใ แ ป ผ ฝ. Move only the finger that presses the key, not the whole hand.
5. Learn Shift with the opposite hand. Practise upper-layer characters such as ฤ ฆ ฏ โ ศ ษ ซ and the tone marks ๊ ๋.
6. Move on to words, sentences and paragraphs. Real text with tone marks and spaces teaches your fingers natural sequences.
7. Measure once a week. Take a one-minute speed test, note your speed and accuracy, and drill your most-missed keys. Our typing speed guide explains the numbers.

A four-week plan

Fifteen to twenty minutes every day beats two hours once a week: muscle memory comes from frequent repetition and rest in between. The targets below follow the Thai skill levels used in the app; treat them as a guide, not a rule.

By the end of week four most learners pass the app's Learner level (12 Thai WPM at 85 percent) and many reach Competent (20 Thai WPM at 88 percent), which is enough for comfortable everyday typing. After that, speed keeps growing with real use and a few short sessions a week.

Common mistakes

• Peeking at the keys. It stops muscle memory forming. If you cannot resist, cover your hands with a light cloth for the first week.
• Chasing speed before accuracy. Fixing errors costs more time than typing slowly and correctly.
• Using the "wrong but handy" finger. It feels faster at first and becomes a speed ceiling later.
• Not returning to the home row. A finger left on another row makes the next key land in the wrong place.
• Typing tone marks in the wrong order. Thai is typed consonant, then upper or lower vowel, then tone mark. See tone mark order.

Practise with Typing to Learn

Typing to Learn follows the order in this guide. Level 1 covers the home row and finger placement, level 2 adds the top and bottom rows, level 3 brings in Shift, the number row and common words, and so on up to level 8. While you type, the on-screen keyboard colours the finger to use, as in Figure 1, and shows which Shift to press. After each lesson you see your speed, accuracy and most-missed keys. The Free plan includes levels 1 to 3 in Thai and English, which covers the whole four-week plan above.

Open the web app, choose Thai and start level 1. No sign-up needed.

Frequently asked questions