2008-09-12, 12:22 AM
Russt Wrote:I picked a majority of it up during a winter break; by the time school resumed I could touch type at 30 wpm which is good enough for most purposes. Of course, from there it got faster the more I used it.
Yeah, it's not really a good idea to try and change while you have to type stuff up for school in the meantime.
Oh, and if you have to work with school computers, be warned that a full switch pretty much cripples your qwerty for a couple months. You'd have to resort to pick-and-poke.
Yeah. I learnt in the holidays. You don't want to be screaming at the keyboard because an assignment's due tomorrow and your typing's screwed up. But now I'm fluent in both qwerty and dvorak - it definitely can be done. I haven't checked, but I think I'm around 80 wpm for Dvorak and 70 for Qwerty if I'm not trying too hard.
Actually, my initial reason for learning Dvorak was that the uni computers kept switching between Qwerty and Dvorak whenever I pressed Ctrl-Shift (I didn't realise this was what I was pressing at the time), so I made up my mind to be able to type in both.
Oh, and yeah, you don't want to be learning BOTH at once. If you're serious about wanting to learn Dvorak, set aside about a month of not having to type fast, and just do Dvorak ONLY. Don't even let yourself think that "I might forget how to type in Qwerty." You'll remember. You just don't want to confuse yourself in the meantime. I think I took about 2 months to get fully up to 60-80 WPM in Dvorak.