Learning Dvorak – Day 2

This is my second day trying to learn the Dvorak keyboard.

Yesterday, I did three typing lessons at The Practice Test. I had to look up the keys for each lesson as I went, but that was not the hard part. The hardest part is unlearning the QWERTY keys that I am already proficient at. I’m wondering if there is any point to learning DVORAK if you can already type 60+ wpm in the QWERY system.

I’ve heard that it’s faster though, and so I thought I would give it a try. I typed the fist sentence of this post with Dvorak and a bunch of misspellings. (I have no clue where the ‘y’ key is or the ‘c’, so tried the closest phonetic spelling I could find.

Today, I reviewed the first three lessons (trying to get 20 wpm before moving on) and then the next three. I could not get 20wpm even after several tries on the second three. I’m hoping that tomorrow it will go better.

I’m really worried that if I succeed with Dvorak it will ruin my QWERTY skills… at the same time, I’m not convinced that this new letter placement is going to be faster to type with even if I do learn it.

The biggest challenge though was when my boyfriend asked me to Google something for him. I tried to type it in, but OH, NO… my keyboard is broken! Took half my practice time to figure out how to switch back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak on the Mac. (Yesterday I was on a windows machine, which was easier to switch on.)