It is a very good question for many reasons. The most important, as I think, may be summarized as following:

• What kind of keyboard trainer should I stick to and why?
• What kind of keyboard layout should I learn first and why?
• What IME (input method engines) should I take into consideration and why?
• What may help me touch-typing with?

I don’t believe that all the questions above may be answered even after you mastered touch-typing techniques, not to say before your PC, pondering over one or few questions put above. This is pretty true about almost everyone trying to make him- or herself start to learn touch-typing. Did you ever asked yourself at least one of the questions on the list above? I bet you did.

To my humble opinion these questions, or questions close to them, is a must be for everyone, who decides to master touch-typing at once; and here are the reasons why:

1) at present almost every civilized human, and note please it doesn’t matter what level of education is attained by you by the time, when the touch-typing has become important to you, should possess touch-typing;
2) it doesn’t matter what language(s) you may speak, write or type – you need it at least in one language of your choice.

Now I try to help you to find answers to the questions listed in the very beginning of the article.

What kind of keyboard of keyboard I should stick to?

The answer is obvious and it is not difficult to find the proper one: you have to try a few keyboard-trainers that are able to teach you touch-typing: (a) the language you need, (b) ASAP.

Why? – You need it, don’t you?

What kind of keyboard layout should I learn first and why?

The present operating system manufacturers are doing their best to meet the most of needs of their potential customers, and, among other features, they try to cover as many languages as they can. De facto, we have a standard now. This standard is Unicode, where every language has its place. It doesn’t mean that there’s a special symbol range dedicated to a particular language, instead every language is included into a so-called script. This notion cannot be covered with one article and takes a few chapters in professional books.

To illustrate the said above let’s talk about a few scripts. For example, they have Cyrillic script and it covers all the symbols belonging to any alphabet, where they use Cyrillic letters; and such languages are numerous: Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Serbian, etc. The same is true about CJK, where they put all hieroglyphs – a special sort of characters where no alphabet is applicable.

To answer “what kind of keyboard layout you have to pick?” is obvious as well: you have to get a keyboard, which has the key labeled with the letters of the language you use.

What IME should I take into consideration?

Input method engines is a complex structure, built on the top of operating system input device interface; in other words, if your computer has a keyboard, it usually may interact with it; and if the operating system is installed on your PC, then this OS is able to process your keyboard signals. Now IME uses everything of the said above and makes the life of the PC user easier.

The smart guys invented the IME in order to separate input methods from the core of OS. This is done because it is almost impossible to foresee all so-called ‘locales’ and to tell an every language user how to tune his PC to use with a language of his preference, and so on and so forth.

Now, if we speak about a Windows family, they have a very straightforward user interface to install almost any language IME (there may be few input methods for one language). If you’re advanced user and tried to use, say, any flavor of Linux or UNIX, there you could see some other pieces of software like,. for example ‘scim’ and its other modifications designed for each X Windows environment: KDE, Gnome, etc.

Of course, it is very difficult to master all these things and there are good news for you: actually you don’t need to get familiar with IME while learning a keyboard with a help of any keyboard trainer as you have to start touch-typing first. But in the event when you have to type in, say, Chinese, i.e. the language having no ABC, perhaps you have to take a closer look at Chinese IMEs as they are based on different systems: phonetic and graphic. The latter is not alphabet-related, and to use one has to learn one glyph-based IME, like Cang Jie.

Why do you have to take into account an IME?

Because they may make your poor learner’s life easier, it’s really so; you have to choose one right for yourself, that’s it.

What may help me touch-typing with?