[PherricOxide]

I haven’t worried much about my typing speed in years (100WPM is faster than I can think when coding or writing most of the time), but I am learning German and wonder if typing massive amounts of text in a language you’re trying to learn could have some benefits?

[kqr]

> I haven’t worried much about my typing speed in years (100WPM is faster than I can think when coding or writing most of the time),

I hear this argument all the time and I don't buy it. Yes, my thinking is slower than 100 wpm on average, but it is extremely bursty. It goes at 0 wpm most of the time then 10000 wpm for short intervals.

I believe the fundamental concern here is not average speed, but latency. How fast can you get the current thought onto the page so that your brain can move on to think about the next thing?

I also type at 100 wpm, and I find my wetware CPU experiences stalled cycles while I'm typing, not able to continue because it needs to hold on to a buffer containing the thought I'm slowly typing out.

[szundi]

Mine is 0 wpm most of the time, but there are nanoseconds when it is almost infinite wpm.

[LoganDark]

We type at something like 150 wpm casually and our brain is still a bit faster... although we've been optimizing it to type out chat messages for years, so that's probably why we can come up with them with such ease

[tmtvl]

What kind of keyboard do you have that polls at such a rate that it can keep up with "almost infinite" (whatever that means) WPM? The best keyboards I have found only have 1000Hz scan rate, which in the absolute best case means only 30,000 WPM. Granted, compared to infinity, every number is equidistant, but when you say "almost infinite" I expect something a bit more impressive (in the 10**80 range, for example).

[rgoulter]

Right. Time spent typing adds latency to evaluating some solution. Ideally, everyone could type with 100% accuracy at 300WPM or whatever.

But, I expect it's diminishing returns on effort.

If you type 30WPM, you'll probably benefit yourself (and your colleagues!!) from learning to type quicker. 80 WPM seems reasonable; 100 WPM is good; 180 WPM is excellent. -- But, I think above some point, the costs of training to type quicker aren't justified by the benefits.

[vehemenz]

Sustained 100 wpm is more than good. I am in the 99th percentile on typeracer.com, and in real world typing I almost never go over 100 wpm.

[linhns]

80WPM is already excellent. That's more than most people on this planet can do. I tried my best but can only do 60WPM at most.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Could it have some benefits? Sure. Maybe you enjoy the movement of your fingers. Maybe it slows your brain down to the point where you linger on each individual word enough to see new things click.

Are these benefits enough to make it the best thing in terms of ROI? I would suspect only rarely.

- If you're not yet at the point where you can understand what you're typing, you are probably served better by more traditional language learning activities. - If you do understand it perfectly you're probably at an advanced enough level that just reading it at your normal reading speed, or writing your own stuff and then having a native speaker is a better form of practice. - If you can understand it with effort but not at a comfortable reading speed yet - you're probably best served by throwing the individual sentences along with machine translations into a spaced repetition system like Anki. Then you can see the same sentence multiple times over the course of a few days and deepen your understanding a little more each time.

[ravel-bar-foo]

Probably in getting used to the forms of the language, but for best results you will want to stay near things you can almost understand. I had two relevant experiences: (1) graduate school advisor told the lab to copy down one paper per week by hand. After a while you learned to copy mindlessly and stopped learning from it. (2) listened to the same second language content 100+ times while commuting and it really helped to build an intuition for what was being said and how to say it.

[fullmoon]

According to Krashen's language acquisition models only input matters, and typing is a very ineffective mode of reading.