GH and the middle-finger reach — first complete words

Lesson 2 adds the G and H keys to your home-row repertoire. G is the index-finger reach to the right of F. H is the index-finger reach to the left of J. Same finger, different hand — each index reaches one key inward.

With G and H added, you can type real English words: ash, has, lash, glad, hall, dash, gas, sad, gash, gasp. The first sentence drills appear here.

Goal at end of Lesson 2: you can type the home-row letters at 20 WPM without looking. That is the floor for everything that comes after.

Bigrams are two-letter combinations that the brain processes as a unit rather than as two separate keystrokes. The home-row bigrams — AS, AD, JK, KL, DK, SL — are the first place where typing transitions from one-finger-at-a-time into chord-like movement. The left hand pairs A-S, A-D, S-D; the right hand pairs J-K, K-L, J-L; cross-hand pairs (D-K, S-L) involve alternation between hands, which is fundamentally faster than same-hand transitions because both hands can move in parallel.

Two recurring failure modes at this stage: (1) same-hand bigrams produce a small finger-tangle when adjacent fingers move in quick succession, especially S-D and K-L for new typists; (2) cross-hand bigrams cause early-onset overtyping (right hand reaching before left has cleared its key) which appears as character order errors on screen — typed 'kjas' instead of 'jkas', for example.

25 minutes daily, four days. Day 1 and 2 focus on same-hand bigrams at slow pace until the finger-tangle stops. Day 3 introduces cross-hand alternation at moderate speed. Day 4 runs a mixed drill that interleaves both. Cover the keyboard for the final two days; the cross-hand alternation is impossible to learn properly while looking at the keys because the brain uses visual feedback to mask the position drift.

Looking ahead: Lesson 3 moves up to the top row, where the reach-distance from home row to top row introduces a new kind of finger movement.

Use a three-run check: at the end of the lesson's drill week, complete the final drill three times on three different days. If all three land at target speed with accuracy at 96% or higher, the lesson is consolidated. If one of the three slips on accuracy, repeat the lesson for another half-week before moving on.

Reaching mastery faster than the suggested week is not a problem. The week-per-lesson cadence is a ceiling, not a floor. Move on the moment the three-run mastery check passes; the next lesson uses these skills as its foundation and rewards full prior-lesson consolidation.

Lesson order in this curriculum is not arbitrary. Each lesson's skill is the assumed foundation for the next. Skipping ahead leaves a gap that surfaces 2-3 lessons later as accuracy collapse or speed stall. The pacing is calibrated for typical learning curves — respecting the order is the fastest path through.

Total curriculum is 10 lessons across roughly 8-10 weeks, including the consolidation phase. Prior typing experience compresses the timeline; absolute beginners extend it. The per-lesson pacing is more important than the overall weeks — drilling one lesson properly always beats half-drilling two.

Keyboard choice. Examination centres run full-size membrane keyboards with deeper key travel than laptop chiclets. Practising on a laptop keyboard alone means the test-day keyboard feels foreign — 5-8 WPM lost to layout shock before typing starts. A basic external USB keyboard added for the final fortnight of practice closes this gap.

Posture rules. Forearms parallel to floor, elbows at 90 degrees, wrists straight when fingers sit on home row, screen at arm's length. The whole point of posture isn't comfort — it's preventing the late-window forearm tension that collapses accuracy in minutes 8-10 of a timed test.

Practice environment. The centre is quiet and distraction-free; mock conditions should match. Phone out of the room (not just face-down), no music with vocals, and a stable working temperature. These small environmental controls add up to noticeable focus improvement across a full lesson week.

Session scheduling. Match practice time-of-day to the scheduled examination slot in the final fortnight. Cognitive performance varies by hour; practising at the matched slot produces test-day results closest to mock numbers. If the slot is unknown, default to morning — most centres run morning sessions.

Lesson 2 is the first time you type real English words by touch. That moment is psychologically important — your brain switches from "this is hard" to "I can do this". Keep going.

Most online tutorials add too many keys in Lesson 2 (the entire top row, for example). We deliberately keep it to 10 keys. Depth before breadth. By the end of Lesson 2 you can type these 10 keys faster than untrained typists can hunt-and-peck them. That is the win.