Row-Jump Bigram Drill (ny mu br ce)
ny mu br ce ex cr un my
Every passage contains: ny mu br ce ex cr un my
QWERTY layout assumed. Backspace corrects; uncorrected errors count against net WPM.
"ny", "mu", "br", "ce", "ex", "cr", "un", and "my" all share one trait regardless of which fingers type them: every pair spans the full distance from the bottom row to the top row, or back, with nothing in between. Most of these happen to land on a single finger — N, Y, M, and U are all right-index keys, and B, R, C, and E are split between the left index and left middle fingers in ways that keep the same finger doing each jump. "ex" and "cr" break that pattern: E, X, C, and R spread across two different fingers, yet the pairs still cost real time, because it's the row distance doing the damage here, not which finger is assigned to the letters.
That's a deliberate contrast with the Same-Finger Bigram Drill, where several of these same letters show up for a completely different reason. A pair can share a finger and stay within one row, share a finger and jump two rows, or use two different fingers and still jump two rows — this drill isolates that last variable on its own by including "ex" and "cr" alongside the same-finger jumps, so the distance itself, not the finger count, is what the whole set has in common.
Why This Drill
The home row carries a raised bump on F and J precisely so a hand can find its bearings without looking. A bigram that goes from the bottom row straight to the top, or the reverse, skips that checkpoint entirely — there's no pause on the middle row to confirm the hand is where it thinks it is, so the whole vertical distance has to be covered in one uninterrupted motion.
That produces a specific failure mode, and it isn't usually total misses. Under speed, the finger commonly falls short and lands back on the home row — the right column, the wrong row — because the home row is where the hand naturally wants to settle rather than where the target letter actually sits. The opposite mistake, overshooting past the target row, happens less often but tends to show up right after a typist has consciously tried to correct for undershooting on a previous attempt.
Running this drill repeatedly gives the hand more reference points for exactly how far a full top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top jump is supposed to feel, independent of which finger is making the trip — which is the piece of information a same-finger drill alone can't isolate, because there the shared finger and the distance are always tangled together.
Skipping the Home Row's Checkpoint
On any ordinary keystroke, a finger either starts from or briefly touches the home row, which is why the raised bumps on F and J exist at all — they're a tactile anchor a hand can find without looking, the same anchor the Home Row: Both Hands Combined lesson builds first. A bigram that jumps straight from the bottom row to the top, or back, never touches that anchor between its two letters, so the finger is travelling the full vertical range of the keyboard with nothing to confirm its position along the way.
Same Finger Doing the Jump vs. Two Fingers Sharing It
"ny", "mu", "br", "ce", "un", and "my" ask one finger to make the whole trip alone. "ex" and "cr" split the same vertical distance across two neighbouring fingers instead, which in principle could let one finger be moving while the other finishes — the situation the Adjacent-Finger Roll Drill is built around. In practice, the sheer distance each finger has to cover on its own half of the jump usually outweighs whatever overlap the two fingers could offer, which is exactly why "ex" and "cr" belong in this drill rather than being treated as ordinary rolls.
The Two Ways This Goes Wrong
Undershooting — landing on the home row instead of continuing to the target — happens when the hand relaxes back toward its resting position mid-jump, and it's the far more common of the two errors here. Overshooting past the target row happens less often, usually right after a typist has consciously tried to correct for undershooting and pushed a little too hard the other way. Noticing which of the two you're actually making is more useful than just noting that the drill feels slow.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's different between this drill and the Same-Finger Bigram Drill, since some pairs look similar?
Several tokens here do happen to share a finger, but this drill is grouped by vertical row distance rather than finger identity — "ex" and "cr" prove the distance problem exists even when two different fingers share the load, which the same-finger drill can't demonstrate on its own.
Why does undershooting to the home row happen so often on these pairs?
The home row is the hand's resting reference, with raised bumps on F and J built for exactly that purpose, so under speed the hand tends to settle back toward it rather than complete the full jump to the target row.
Is "ex" a same-finger pair like most of the rest?
No — E is the left middle finger and X is the left ring finger. It's included because the two rows are still a full jump apart, which shows the distance problem isn't limited to pairs that also happen to share a finger.
Does a flatter keyboard make this drill harder?
It can make the three rows feel slightly less physically distinct from each other, which may make it a little harder to notice exactly when a jump has skipped the middle one — though the underlying distance problem is the same on any keyboard shape.
Should I look at the keyboard while first learning this drill?
It's better not to — use the raised bumps on F and J as your before-and-after reference points the way the True Touch Typing: The No-Look Discipline lesson trains, since the whole point of this drill is building a reliable blind reach across the distance, not confirming it visually.