Home row practice
Rest all eight fingers on the home keys. Feel for the ridges on F and J. Every word below can be typed without any finger leaving its row.
Just start typing.Tabrestarts
Why this row gets so much attention
The home row is not just eight more keys. It is the reference point that every other key on the board is measured from. If your hands cannot find it reliably without looking, nothing built on top of it will be reliable either.
This is also why it deserves more repetition than it seems to. The keys themselves are easy; the automatic return to them is the skill.
The order to learn them in
Start with F and J, the two index fingers, because they have the tactile ridges and they anchor everything else. Then D and K, then S and L, and finally A and semicolon.
A and the semicolon come last deliberately. They belong to the little fingers, which are the weakest and least independent, and they are where accuracy usually collapses first. Almost everyone who plateaus around 50 words per minute plateaus because of these two.
G and H are not home keys
G and H sit in the middle of the row but they are reaches, not resting positions. The index finger stretches sideways to hit them and then comes straight back.
Watch that the rest of your hand does not follow the reach. If your little finger leaves A when you type G, the movement is too big.
Common questions
Why do F and J have bumps?
So you can locate home position by touch alone, without looking down. Every standard keyboard has them, and they are the reason touch typing is physically possible.
How long should I stay on the home row?
Until you can type home-row words at a steady rhythm without looking - usually two or three short sessions. Staying much longer than that is not useful; the top and bottom rows reinforce the return-to-home habit anyway.