TypingDesk
User Guide
TypingDesk teaches, drills, and gamifies keyboard typing. It runs fully offline — no account or internet needed.
It speaks English, Français, Deutsch, Español, اردو and العربية throughout: not just the menus, but the lesson text you practise, the words in the games, and the voice that reads dictation aloud. Urdu and Arabic also mirror the whole app right-to-left — see section 8.
Contents
1. Getting started & profiles
- Launch the app. On first run you'll see the “Who's typing?” start screen.
- Create a profile — enter a name, pick an emoji avatar, your language, and the keyboard layout you want to practise. Click Create profile.
These are two separate choices on purpose. Language decides what you read and hear; layout decides which keyboard the app draws and drills. You can practise Spanish text on a US keyboard, or English on AZERTY, if that is your setup. Urdu and Arabic are the exception — picking either brings its keyboard layout with it, since those scripts cannot be produced on a Latin layout.
- Returning users: just click your profile card to enter. The most recently used profile is marked Current.
Each profile keeps its own progress, stats, achievements, and settings, so a whole family can share one PC.
Managing profiles
- With two or more profiles, click Manage profiles to reveal a trash icon on each card, then delete the ones you don't want. Deleting a profile permanently removes all of its data (you'll be asked to confirm).
- Switch profiles any time from the avatar at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. The sidebar
- Home — greeting, day streak, best WPM, total sessions, and a daily-goal bar.
- Lessons — structured practice.
- Dictation — listen-and-type practice on your own text (jumps straight to the Custom tab in Dictation mode).
- Games — five typing games.
- Stats — your progress and achievements.
- Settings — appearance, language, layout, sound, typography.
- ⓘ (top of sidebar) — the About window.
3. Lessons
- Open Lessons. Choose a Tier and a practice Mode, or use Search to find a lesson.
- New to typing? Click the banner at the top to open the Finger-placement guide — it shows which finger presses each key, the home row, and the F/J bumps. Press Start home-row lesson to begin.
- Click Start on any lesson card to begin typing.
Tiers: Beginner (home row → all letters, plus word lessons and a capitals & punctuation bridge) → Intermediate → Advanced → Code → Custom (paste your own text, or load a .txt / .md file). Higher tiers unlock as you hit WPM/accuracy targets. Code lessons can be filtered by programming language.
You type real words from the very first lesson
Between the key drills sit word lessons that use only the letters you have been taught so far — dad sad flask once you know the home row, then more as each row is added. Which words appear is worked out from your keyboard layout, so the same lesson gives you different words on QWERTY than on Dvorak, and different words again on each Urdu layout.
Lessons are written in your language
Real sentences in French, German, Spanish, Urdu or Arabic — not translated English. The numbers-and-symbols drill goes further and uses your local conventions: a French passage practises 14/03 and 1 299,99 €, a German one 14.03. and 1.299,99 €.
Two things stay the same in every language, by design: the beginner key drills (they come from your keyboard layout, not from any language) and the code snippets (source code is source code — only the lesson titles translate).
Modes
- Timed — type as much as you can in the time limit.
- Quota — finish the passage; scored at the end.
- Zen — no timer, no pressure.
- Repeat-until-perfect — the passage loops until you hit the accuracy target.
- Dictation — the passage is read aloud and hidden; you type what you hear (see the next section).
While typing: correct characters turn green, mistakes red, the caret slides along, and the on-screen keyboard highlights the next key. A results card shows your WPM, accuracy, stars, and any new achievements.
4. Dictation
Dictation reads a passage aloud, one sentence at a time, while hiding the letters — you type what you hear. It is a listening-and-spelling workout on top of typing.
Two ways to start it
- Click Dictation in the sidebar — this opens the Custom tab so you can paste or import your own text, with Dictation mode already selected. Press Start.
- Or on Lessons, pick any prose lesson (Intermediate, Advanced or Custom), choose Dictation from the Mode list, and press Start. (Beginner key-drills like
asdf jkl;do not make sense read aloud.)
While practising
- Each hidden letter shows as a dot, and the spaces between words stay visible — so you can see how many words are coming and how long each one is, without being shown the letters. Each letter is revealed as you type it. The on-screen keyboard is hidden too, so it cannot give away the next key.
- Scoring is lenient — capitalisation and punctuation are ignored, so you only type the words you hear. A missing comma or capital is never counted wrong.
- Press F5 (or the 🔊 Replay button) to hear the current sentence again.
- Drag the Speed slider (0.5×–2×) to slow the voice down or speed it up. Your choice is remembered and becomes the default for future sessions (you can also set the default under Settings → Dictation).
Voices
Dictation uses the text-to-speech voices installed in Windows. A fresh Windows PC often has only a couple of basic English voices — and none for other languages — so you may want to add better ones. These are free and install for offline use.
| What you want | Where in Windows |
|---|---|
| Better-sounding English voices (“Natural” voices) | Settings → Accessibility → Narrator → Natural voices → Add natural voices |
| Voices for other languages (French, German, Spanish, …) | Settings → Time & language → Speech → Manage voices → Add voices |
5. Games
Open Games and pick one. Each has a start screen with a Play button; press Esc during a game to pause (Resume / Quit & save).
- Letter Rain — press the key matching each falling letter. 3 misses ends it.
- Word Blaster — type a falling word and press Enter to blast it. Waves get faster.
- Survival — type each word before its timer runs out; build combos; it speeds up.
- Speed Sprint — race a ghost of your own best run over a passage.
- Typing Duel — race a CPU opponent (pick Easy / Medium / Hard) to the finish.
Word Blaster and Survival draw their words from your language. High scores are saved per profile. Quitting mid-game still saves your score.
6. Stats
- WPM trend — your last sessions as a line graph.
- Error heatmap — the keyboard tinted by how often you mistype each key (cool = few, hot = many).
- Day streak, personal bests per mode, and your achievement badges (locked badges are dimmed).
7. Settings
- Appearance — switch between Light and Dark themes.
- Language — English, Français, Deutsch, Español, اردو, العربية (applies instantly). This changes the whole app: menus, lesson text, game words, and the dictation voice. Choosing اردو or العربية also switches the app to right-to-left and brings the matching keyboard layout with it.
- Keyboard layout — the layout you practise: QWERTY (US), QWERTY (ES), AZERTY (FR), QWERTZ (DE), Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, Urdu Phonetic, Urdu (Windows), Arabic (101). Independent of your OS layout, and for the Latin layouts independent of your chosen language too.
- Sound — toggle keystroke/error sounds and set the volume, and pick a sound theme (Soft, Mechanical, Typewriter, Marimba).
- Dictation — the default playback speed for dictation lessons (0.5×–2×).
- Typography — adjust the passage font size.
All settings save automatically to the active profile.
8. Urdu and Arabic
Both are full languages, not just keyboard layouts: the interface, the lessons and the game words are all in them, and the app mirrors right-to-left.
Two Urdu layouts, and the difference matters
| Layout | How it works | Choose it if |
|---|---|---|
| Urdu Phonetic (the default) |
Type by sound: a gives ا, b gives ب, s gives س, k gives ک. Shift gives the related letter, so t/T give ت/ٹ and d/D give د/ڈ. |
You are starting out. This is how most Urdu is typed in Pakistan and the easiest place to begin. |
| Urdu (Windows) | The standard positional layout that ships with Windows, at its real key positions. Note that a is م here, not ا. |
You want what you practise to match the Urdu keyboard you will use elsewhere. |
Arabic
Arabic uses the standard Arabic 101 layout. Note that ذ sits on the backtick key, left of 1 — the on-screen keyboard shows it there.
The Shift layer
Both scripts have no capitals, so Shift carries a second letter rather than an upper-case one, and a good part of the alphabet lives there — آ ں ڛ گ in Urdu, أ إ آ in Arabic. The on-screen keyboard prints the Shift letter above the base one, the way a real keycap is.
Fonts
Lessons and passages are shown in a bundled Nastaliq (Urdu) or Naskh (Arabic) face, so they look right whether or not your Windows install has an Arabic-script font.
9. Tips
- Touch typing: keep your fingers on the home row, feel for the F and J bumps, and keep your eyes on the screen — not your hands.
- Beginners: master letters first; numbers and symbols come in the Advanced and Code tiers.
- Build a habit: aim for the 10-minute daily goal on the Home screen.
- Accented characters: French, German and Spanish passages contain letters like
é,ßandñ. The TypingDesk layout setting only draws the on-screen keyboard — what you can actually type is decided by your Windows keyboard layout. If accented letters will not type, add the matching layout underSettings → Time & language → Language & region. (Urdu and Arabic are the exception: those keystrokes are translated by TypingDesk itself, so no Windows layout is needed.)
10. Your data
All progress is stored locally in a single database at:
Delete that file to reset the app to a clean first-run state. Nothing is sent anywhere.