Have you ever wished for a way to practice typing so that you may become a more efficient and capable keyboard jockey? Typing at the "speed of thought," perhaps? Well so did we, but we also didn't want to bother downloading anything so that we could achieve this fickle daydream of ours. Enter Keybr, the flash based type instructor you've been waiting for.

Keybr is very straight-forward, and honestly, quite ingenious. You can choose from three basic lessons that start with a certain number of keys on the keyboard, and then, as you progress through the lessons, more keys are added to the mix to make things a little tougher. As a nice touch, it keeps live track of all your mistakes and your words-per-minute (wpm), and even creates graphs of your performance.

But, things get better yet. Once you deem that the lessons have nothing left to offer you, get ready to play with custom mode, where you can edit the text that you want to practice. Very bare-bones, but oh-so functional.

The best part of all this may be that Keybr supports a surprising amount of different keyboard layouts. Everything from international keyboards (French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Italian) to regional and alternative variations - such as Dvorak, UK layouts, and others.

And although Keybr does not have games or other fancy gimmicks that might make the experience more exciting or visually stimulating, as far as free, flash-based typing programs go, you will agree that this one is rather good.

[via Webware]

I'm not sure why this game is called Knuckles in China Land, but it's a learning game for practicing your Japanese characters--Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji--or your Japanese, Indonesian, or German vocabulary. The game stars Knuckles from the Sonic the Hedgehog games (unlicensed, I'm sure) and takes the form of a traditional RPG, except that instead of fighting battles with monsters, you must master characters and vocabulary words. It comes with libraries which include thousands of characters and words, but if you want more it also has a Vocabulary Editor to add your own.