http://www.typingstudy.com - here you can learn to touch type well with colemak keyboard layout. It's free and very educational!

5. When I type in qwerty, my right pinky is resting on the p. This allows me to have a very straight wrist, which is the comfortable position. Since the o in Colemak is typed with the pinky on the middle row, I had it rest there instead, which made my wrist bend inward, resulting in a much more strained position.

That said, Colemak makes using bad keyboards with wobbly pressure points a lot easier. Since you're not moving your finges around that much, you're hitting individual keys at more perpendicular angles, resulting in less missed keys. I also think that for people that don't like using their left hand more than their right, it's glorious. The fact that maybe one in a hundred people even knows that alternate keyboard layouts exist though won't go away, which is why I don't think it's a real option for anyone that does not have the luxury of using no computer but their own.

3. I got to a speed of about 70 wpm in about a month practice, but then, progress stagnated. I realized that if I wanted to be as good in Colemak as I had been in qwerty, it would mean putting in the same amount if not more of work, since at that point, it wasn't a question of quick fingers or memorizing keys, but memorizing whole words as a movement-sequence. That was pretty demotivational.

4. In Colemak, the right hand has slightly more work than the left. It's the other way around in qwerty, which favors the left hand very strongly. I found that my left hand was quicker and more agile than my right, although I'm right-handed, and Colemak's emphasize on the right hand made my typing feel awkward and sluggish. I attest that left-hand ability to decades of playing the e-guitar, but that is just a hypothesis.

Hey gedeon, yes I have abandoned the Colemak layout. This has several reasons:

1. Becoming proficient in Colemak made me lose my ability to touch type in qwerty. I had to look at the keyboard whenever I was using a computer that wasn't mine, and I was really slow. The Colemak community site had said you would lose some of your accuracy and speed, but I went down to something like 10 wpm if I tried to type blindly. This was just unacceptable. It took me about 3 - 4 days typing more than 2 hours a day to regain my qwerty skills.

2. I've had the situation several times that I had friends over that wanted to use my PC, and they were, of course, completely lost. It's easy to switch between layouts in the windows surface, but in some programs you have to re-launch everything to switch layouts.

Hey, thanks for stopping by on my new profile! So far, the transition is hard work; whenever I try to let my fingers do the thinking, I switch to querty mode almost instantly... so typing takes a lot of concentration. I think it might be worth the trouble though, the distance the fingers have to travel is for typing a propper English text is noticably reduced even now already!

Hey, 5880 games... that's real dedication! And thanks for all the good quotes. Keep it up! ;-)

My tip to improve your typing speed is to type as fast as you can! and it works.

My tip to improve your typing speed is to... nah, I'm not going to tell you!

When my fingers hurt after too much time on the keyboard, I scream. Because it hurts.

My tip to improve your typing speed is to type faster.