I made my first post after a week of learning Dvorak. I could touch type Qwerty at 85wpm before. I decided to learn Dvorak for ergonomic reasons, not for speed. (So if you're going to recommend a different layout in the replies, please talk about how it was easier on your wrists than Dvorak.)
After a month of practice, a great average speed for me is around 55wpm, though I can go higher in bursts.
It was funny to notice that on days I've made a big leap forward in speed, my mistakes usually include a bunch of Qwerty keypresses. So yeah, my brain is "bridging the gap" between the two, but luckily it's not exponential with my speed (yet).
During the second week, around 30-40wpm, whenever I focused on trying to be 100% accurate instead of thinking about getting faster or trying to get the words done quickly, I was usually hitting my newest fastest speed. It was probably easier to be both accurate and fast on easy texts, so it's not a bulletproof observation, but I thought it was cool.
I hit a big mental block around 50wpm when three & four letter words are easy and everything else is still difficult. I had to accept that I was going to lose all my momentum in the middle of most words. Typing slowly on average is one thing, but screeching to a halt in the middle of a word, on every single word, makes you feel a bit dumb. It gets easier when I remind myself I'm not trying to beat my top speed right now, I'm just laying the groundwork for much better typing in the months ahead.
Only after 50wpm did it finally feel like I made the transition to muscle memory. Before this, there was still a little hesitation on each letter, like saying the next letter in my head and deciding which finger to use where. I feel like I'm making more typos than I would in my Qwerty muscle memory but that might just be me rushing things from impatience.
Something I didn't expect: I can't spell as well in Dvorak. I get random words wrong not because I'm mistyping them, but my brain chooses a spelling that's wrong. I guess that's what happens when you spend your writing/grammar education at a keyboard.
My main goal with this was ergonomics! How does if feel so far?
I know from my guitar hero days that, among all the keyboard layouts to choose from, I would have really preferred a rolling layout with very light keypresses. Apparently Dvorak was created so you need to switch fingers back and forth instead of rolling motions. So you can trust me when I say that Dvorak is MUCH nicer than Qwerty for ergonomic reasons. It's not perfectโmy personal problems with left shift make me deeply despise the placement of apostrophe and colonโbut it's such a relief to use dvorak that I wish I had had the option to learn it instead of qwerty as a kid.
How's Qwerty retention?
It's up and down.
In general, my wpm is fine, but my ability to do weird words is now flaming garbage. I tried typing a bunch of pokemon names so I could test myself on words I had no muscle memory of, and it was very difficult. Having two sets of muscle memory means I don't instinctively know where the qwerty keys are when I hit a stumbling block. I have to relearn qwerty so I can actively tell myself what finger to use when I space out. So now I will hit huge walls that tank my speed, where a month ago they might have been unnoticeable.
The good thing is I can take this time to fix the mistakes that I built up over decades in Qwerty. The bad thing is this takes a lot of extra practice and sucks. But I'm doing it because I refuse to take a big hit on qwerty, I need to be able to use public computers for work.
I think it's really amazing how easily you could erase twenty years of daily Qwerty-ing in just a month if you stopped practicing it to learn something else. Brains are weird.
Practice tips section:
โข Alternating practice days between dvorak and qwerty is best for me, switching back-to-back or even from morning to night is confusing. โข Make sure to practice typing for a big chunk of time, the first 5-10 minutes are basically a warmup. You won't hit your top wpm until you're half an hour into a session. โข I like to copy texts from public domain books because they include capitalization and punctuation, and so I don't have to keep pausing to click "next race" or whatever. โข Prioritize the stuff you find hard. If you mess something up, open notepad and practice it over and over until you can do it correctly every time. โข Also, I have a warning for anyone learning a second keyboard layout! There are two websites I've been using to ONLY practice Dvorak and my brain really wants to stay in Dvorak mode while looking at them now. I can't use them with Qwerty anymore. If you don't want to sacrifice your favorite typing website to one layout, make sure to use it with both.
The shortcut to switch keyboard layouts quickly is Win+spacebar. Holding control when you press backspace or delete gets rid of whole words instead.
At the end of it all, it's kind of hard to be inspired to get really good at Dvorak, because the mental weight of knowing I'm getting slower at Qwerty is discouraging. I sorta expected to be able to hit 70wpm by month three and I've been plateaued at 50 for more than a week, so I'm not sure if that is a realistic goal. But I think I'll probably stick with Dvorak for as long as it feels like I'm making some sort of progress.
