What to expect over time.
Progress is real and progress is uneven. The uneven part is not failure — it is what motor learning actually looks like.
In the first year, expect motor skill consolidation, expanded vocabulary, and growing trust between learner and partner. Expect setbacks during illness, transitions, and sensory overload. Expect the first time a teacher, sibling, or grandparent reads something the typist wrote and cries.
In years two through five, expect more independence — different partners, smaller boards, eventually keyboards. Some typists become fully independent. Some keep a single trusted partner for life. Both are real outcomes. Neither is failure.
The longest practitioners in this work will tell you the same thing: trust the gradient, trust the body, and never confuse a hard week with a verdict.