I decided to try something different today and see how other people are teaching the Dvorak keyboard. Would some letter drills designed for Dvorak help me get faster?
This site says, don’t do letter drills. Fine, I wasn’t. I still feel lost and their very first drill looks as intimidating as trying to type my email! So I backed away slowly. Taking a second look, I think those were all home row keys, but it still looks too hard to begin with.
Now I feel like Goldilocks. After 10 (very nicely designed) lessons, I’ve had enough of letter drills. I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything much or improved my skills as much as I was hoping from letter drills. The drills themselves, while they look beautiful are LONG and BORING, and I’m anxious to get on with it and type something real.
Programmer Dvorak Typing Tutor
Oh, not, not more drills! But better drills. (Maybe the same drills?) The good thing is I can choose between them and not have to “play” the whole game to get the next lesson. I’m bookmarking this one for future reference, but not in the mood for these drills today.
After several blogs and forums here is another set of lessons, and oh, what are they DOING? The keys are all in yet another order. Ok, there is more than one way to layout a keyboard and still call it Dvorak. This is obviously a different one (they had vowels on the right…)
Conclusion…
Even though The Practice Test is far from perfect, I am not thinking I will find what I’m looking for elsewhere. At the same time, the key combinations in a QWERTY course don’t seem that helpful for learning Dvorak, so it really needs to be improved. I’ll be thinking about how to do that as I continue my practice. Today I will try typing some common words to see how well I remember the alphabet. I might even venture over to try some pangrams.
My head still hurts, but not quite so bad. I got 10wpm on both tests. That and this last paragraph took half an hour!