How long does it take to learn touch typing?
The short answer is three to six weeks of fifteen minutes a day to type without looking at around 30 WPM, and a few months of ordinary daily typing to pass 60 WPM.
That range is wide because it is doing real work. The people at the fast end are not more talented. They practise on more days, and they refuse to look down. Almost everything else is noise.
What each week actually feels like
Week one is the bad one, and it is bad in a specific way. Your speed drops. If you currently hunt-and-peck at 45 WPM, you will spend the first week somewhere near 12. This is not a sign that it is not working — it is the sign that it is. You are building a new motor pattern while an old, faster one sits right there offering to take over. Most people who quit, quit here, and they quit because nobody told them the dip was scheduled.
Week two is when the home row stops needing thought. J and F, then K and D, then L and S. You stop hunting for them. You will still be slow, but the slowness moves — it is no longer about finding keys, it is about the keys you have not met yet.
Weeks three and four are the long middle. Top row, bottom row, capitals. Accuracy is the thing to watch here, not speed. Somewhere in this stretch you will notice you typed a whole sentence without deciding to, which is the actual milestone.
Weeks five and six are punctuation and numbers, and they are slower to stick than letters because you use them less. The number row in particular takes months of ordinary use rather than weeks of drilling, and that is fine. Nobody needs to touch-type a digit on day forty.
The two things that decide it
Do not look at the keyboard. This is not a discipline tip, it is the whole method. If you look, you are rehearsing the habit you sat down to replace, and you can practise for six weeks without improving at all. Willpower is usually not enough in week one — put a cloth over your hands or a shallow cardboard box over the keyboard. Nearly everyone needs the physical barrier at first, and almost nobody needs it after ten days.
Practise on more days, not for longer. Motor skills consolidate between sessions, not during them. Fifteen minutes on six days beats ninety minutes on Sunday, and it is not close. If your accuracy falls apart mid-session, stop — practice past fatigue rehearses the sloppy version of the movement, and you will have to un-learn it later.
Does age matter?
Not much, and not in the direction people expect. Adults pick up touch typing about as fast as children do. What adults have is an existing habit that already works well enough, which makes week one feel like a demotion rather than a beginning. A twelve-year-old with no prior method has nothing to give up.
The group that finds it hardest is fast hunt-and-peck typists — people at 60 WPM with their eyes down. They have the most to surrender and the least obvious reason to. The case for doing it anyway is that their ceiling is roughly half of what touch typing allows, and that eyes-down typing costs them every single time they have to read from a document, a second monitor, or a person talking.
What speed should you actually aim for?
Around 40 WPM is normal for an adult who types daily. Sixty to eighty is comfortably past what almost any job requires. Above 100 is competitive territory and has more to do with enjoying it than needing it.
Aim for 95% accuracy at whatever speed you are currently at, and let the speed follow. Accuracy built first is what raises the ceiling; speed built first just means you type mistakes faster and then spend the time back on the backspace key.
Where to start
Start with J and F, because they are the two keys with tactile bumps and your index fingers can find them without looking. Then add two keys at a time, working outward from the strongest fingers. Do not learn an entire keyboard row in one go — no established course does, because it is a ten-key jump with nothing to practise in between.
The step-by-step method goes through the full key order and a week-by-week schedule. If you would rather just start, the lesson path begins on J and F and builds every drill from the keys you have unlocked plus the ones you keep missing.