Keyboard finger placement

Start on the home row

Rest your left fingers on A S D F and your right fingers on J K L ;. Both thumbs sit on the space bar. This is the home row, and it is the position your hands return to after every single key.

Find it without looking. Almost every keyboard has a small raised bump on F and on J, put there for exactly this purpose. Feel for the two bumps, drop the other fingers either side, and your hands are placed correctly.

The return is the part people skip. Reaching up to a key is easy; coming back to the same spot without checking is what takes practice, and it is why the early lessons drill single keys rather than words.

Which finger owns which key

Each finger covers a diagonal column running up and down from its home key. The index fingers cover two columns each, which is why they handle the most letters.

Both thumbs share the space bar. Most typists favour one; either is fine, as long as the fingers stay on the home row while it happens.

Shift belongs to the opposite hand

This is the rule beginners break most often. To type a capital A, hold the right Shift with your right little finger and press A with your left. For a capital P, hold the left Shift instead.

Using the same hand for both forces one hand to contort and pulls it off the home row, which costs more time than the capital itself. Same-hand Shift is the single most common reason a typist stalls in the sixties and cannot work out why.

Posture, briefly

Wrists floating rather than resting on the desk, elbows roughly at a right angle, fingers curved rather than flat. None of this matters over fifteen seconds; all of it matters over an hour, and it is much easier to learn now than to correct later.

One honest limitation

No website can tell which finger you actually used. A browser reports the character that arrived, not the finger that produced it, so any site claiming to detect finger errors from an ordinary keyboard is claiming something impossible.

What software can do is teach the correct finger, show it clearly, and refuse to move on until the right key is pressed — which is how the beginner lessons here work. The honesty of the habit is still down to you.