A free typing school for Bangla and English

Our story

LearnType started in 2024 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, out of a simple frustration: there was no single, well-built place on the internet to learn Bangla typing properly. The existing tools were either abandoned Windows installers from the early 2000s, ad-heavy blog posts, or English-only tutors that bolted on a Bangla mode as an afterthought. We wanted one modern home that taught both major Bangla layouts (Avro Phonetic and Bijoy) and English touch typing with the same production quality you would expect from a paid product — and we wanted it to be free.

The project began as a side build: a single developer porting the official OmicronLab Avro keymap into a browser-based typing engine and pairing it with the home-row drills most of us remember from school. Once the core engine worked, we layered on Bijoy (the traditional Bengali typewriter layout), an English track, a code-snippets track, GRE vocabulary drills, and a suite of arcade games that turn drilling into something you actually want to do. Everything is built in the open, runs in any modern browser, and needs no installation.

Our mission

Basic computer literacy — the ability to type without staring at the keyboard — is a prerequisite for almost every office, government, journalism, education and freelance job today. In Bangladesh alone, millions of students graduate every year without ever receiving structured typing tuition, and the few paid typing courses that exist are out of reach for most learners outside the major cities. Our mission is to close that gap: a world-class typing curriculum, available to anyone with a browser, in the language they actually work in, at no cost.

We believe typing education is infrastructure, not a luxury. Just as a calculator or a search engine is expected to be free, we think a good typing tutor should be too. That belief shapes every product decision we make — what goes in the free plan, how we treat user data, and what we refuse to add (ads, upsells, dark patterns).

LearnType by the numbers

We are a small project, but we cover a lot of ground. As of today the platform includes:

• 60+ lessons spanning the Avro Phonetic and Bijoy Bangla tracks, English touch typing, numbers and punctuation, code typing in five languages, and GRE vocabulary.
• 13 arcade games including Falling Words, Food Ninja, Nitro Racer, and multiplayer typing races with live opponents and bots.
• Three layouts taught end-to-end: Avro Phonetic (phonetic Bangla), Bijoy (the traditional Bengali typewriter layout), and standard English QWERTY.
• 100% free for individuals — no ads, no credit card, no locked lessons, no upsell, ever.

How we teach

Typing fluency is muscle memory, not knowledge. Reading about touch typing will not make you faster; only repeated, correctly sequenced finger movement will. LearnType is designed around four evidence-based principles that the motor-learning literature has consistently validated.

• Progressive unlocking. We start at the home row and introduce one or two new keys per lesson. You cannot rush ahead to the number row before your index fingers have stopped hunting — the curriculum is gated so each lesson reinforces the previous one before adding complexity. This is the same scaffolded practice approach used to train pianists and surgeons.
• Short and frequent beats long and rare. Fifteen minutes a day for two weeks builds more durable muscle memory than a single two-hour session on Saturday. LearnType lessons are 3–7 minutes long on purpose, so you can fit them into a commute or a lunch break.
• Drill the keys you're slow on, not random text. Every keystroke is measured. Smart Practice reads your per-key error patterns and generates drills, passages, code snippets and stories that target exactly the keys slowing you down — instead of generic Lorem Ipsum that trains nothing in particular.
• Real-time feedback you can act on. Live WPM, accuracy, error heatmaps and per-finger stats are shown the instant you type. If a specific finger is dragging your average down, we tell you and suggest a five-minute reinforcement drill to fix it.
• Games are not gimmicks. Typing under time pressure recruits a different part of the motor system than steady drilling. Our 13 games exist to push your fingers past the speed you can hold comfortably, which is the only way to raise that ceiling.

How it's funded

LearnType is free for individuals and runs on a tiny budget — currently a single small cloud server. The team is funded through unrelated consulting work. We have no ads, no upsells, and we don't sell user data. A paid team plan for schools and offices is on the roadmap; nothing in the free plan goes away when that ships.

Team

LearnType is a small team based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We're typists, engineers and educators. If you'd like to contribute (lessons, games, translations, accessibility), email hello@learntype.app.

Get in touch

Questions, feedback, partnerships — use the contact page or check the FAQ first.