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Is it worth the switch?

  • Started by koekjestrommel1
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GTvhUdu.png

so close to 100 wpm. If I woulnd't have missed the last word i'd have been there.

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N;t for me, I tried to learn colemak, and in the process of trying to learn colemak, lost the ability to type qwerty.  Now I can't do either, and am starting all over with the typing tutor programs to relearn qwerty.  I am averaging 6 wpm.  Baby steps I guess.  Two months ago I could do about 70 wpm in qwerty.  Am I a rare case?  You really don't realize what you have until it's gone.  Colemak is not useful to me if it means if it becomes a major damper to using nearly every other computer, kiosk, self check out, smartphone, etc, etc, etc.

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I think you might be an extreme case ducttapeandzipties, I've went through these forums and have collected a number of experiences and the majority seem to have regained there old qwerty, speeds between 2 and 6 months.  Most have reported gains in speed after that eventually.  In my personal experience I am 1 day away from my 3rd month (12 weeks). I'm currently typing at 71wpm, which is 85% of my qwerty speed of 83. My progress has slowed down tremendously but is still happening gradually, but I've been at what I consider to be a functional speed of 50+ for more than 2 months.

If you have a daily chart that you have been keeping I would like to see it, I plan on making a communal graph showing different peoples experiences, and people should know about yours as well.

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I'm still able to type at about 60 wpm in qwerty. I just tried qwerty for the first time in months and this was my score at 10fastfingers. 56_291_0_0_52_3_38.51_792_1288.jpg
On the other hand, When I type in qwerty I only use two or three fingers instead of the 10 most people use. So ,my technique between the two styles is quite different which makes it easier to switch I guess. When I was typing at my max speed in qwerty I was able to type at about 80 wpm, and I guess of you give me a a day or two I'd be ably to type at speeds of 75 wpm in qwerty again.

So yeah, it is pretty weird that you completely lost your ability to type in qwerty. I mean 6 WPM should take about an hour to reach no matter what keyboard you're using.

Since I've typed all of the above in qwerty I'll do another test to see if I gained any speed in these 100 or so words.

60_308_0_0_53_2_43.88_724_1290.jpg
I guess I did.

Now one colemak test.
84_442_0_0_78_4_75.97_310_1290.jpg

So I guess I'm able to type in both now.

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How do you manage to keep strong in both QWERTY and Colemak? You have a rare ability there.

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ctwv0R4.png

Achievement unlocked!

This will be the last post from me for a long time in this topic. I've reached my goal which I set myself when I started using colemak. This speed is 30% faster than my max speed which I achieved in qwerty after 10 years of using qwerty.
This is it. The end of training.

Is it worth the switch?

Yes.

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too many wrong words though - you ought to work on that with some more training ;-)

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  • From: Viken, Norway
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Congratulations! You are now a hero of the peopl... uh, well, you're an unsung hero I guess. ;)

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Little update after 3 months or so. Just did two typing tests after another, one with colemak and one with qwerty. I managed to get 85 WPM on colemak, and directly switching to qwerty afterwards I managed to get 62 WPM with qwerty hunting and pecking.
The words which are in the list on 10fastfingers I still type the fastest even today, and I guess that I haven't been practicing enough with other types of typing trainers. So remember people, don't focus on the 100 or so words on 10fastfingers, they mainly teach you how to type those 100 words very quickly. Which I'm still grateful for, because they are words which you use a lot.


I type too little from day to day basis to keep my speeds properly high, nor have I the intention to. The 100+ WPM was just on 10fastfingers and when I type normally, I'm guessing I'm able to type at about 70 WPM, which is fine for me.

I'll update again in a couple of months, a year after I started.

10.000+ views, that doesn't happen a lot to me on the internet ;).

Last edited by koekjestrommel1 (06-May-2014 23:33:20)
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I just made this video. First minute I do a colemak speedtest, then directly switch to qwerty and also do a speedtest there. You can see my mild confusion for a couple of secs just after the switch. Funny, that even after a year of switching and barely using qwerty at all it still is no problem at all to switch in one go. I'm guessing it's the completely other typing technique I use. Video is more interesting than I thought, I recorded the screen and the way I type.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB3k3Q4 … e=youtu.be

Also this :D :
A8sKxiz.png

Last edited by koekjestrommel1 (13-Dec-2014 03:13:37)
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After more than a year, I managed to beat my previous record (set at 27-1-2014) by.... 1 WPM

V9cKcfE.png

I haven't been practicing in pretty much forever, so I'm not that dissapointed :D

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congrats! well, then, you haven't lost any skill ^^

that's fast: 106 wpm

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-j has shitty location on colemak
-j has frequency of about 1.5% in Dutch language
-2/3 of time the j is part of the 'ij' combination
-ij combo is very important in Dutch language: mijn (my), zijn (are, his), fijn (nice), pijn (pain) and heaps and heaps of other words
-ij is quite shitty to type

Solution: Change 'ii' to 'ij' using autohotkey.
'ii' is never used in the Dutch nor in the English language, so it's the perfect combo for typing the 'ij'


Fun to see that even after a year or so, changes like this are still coming to my mind.

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@koekjestrommel1, with your alias, no wonder you moan.  It looks more suited for Qwerty!  In english, I barely have to type j.

What's your main language that you type in?

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koekjestrommel1 said:

-j has shitty location on colemak

What about this suggestion of doing a J/K switch? Another option might be a J/; switch as long JO is not very common in Dutch.  My Dutch is not up to much so I wouldn't know.  I would probably be better at double-dutch :)

Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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Indeed, the optimalisation for English hides away the J that Dutch needs. I'd consider some switching within the index finger domain, like Steve says. Maybe a Curl mod with a J>H>K loop? That'd bring the J back to its QWERTY position! But the K is quite common too, and the KJ bigram would be tricky.

A further option might be to put the K down to the old QWERTY N position with a Wide mod, and the backslash or whatever was there at the old U position instead of J. That way the KJ bigram would be nicely achievable with the slide-in technique. The downwards stretch is much easier than the upwards one, according to us Curl modders!

[   \   L   U   Y   ;
 ]   J   N   E   I   O
   K   H   M   ,   .
Last edited by DreymaR (10-Mar-2015 20:33:53)

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I'm not sure which syllabus you used, but there seems to be quite a big difference in frequencies compared to this Dutch-language site (https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/advies/l … nederlands)

All the letters you noted (M H K) are acually more frequent in Dutch than the J.

The only real solution would be something with the y, which has a frequence of practically 0 in the Dutch language, and is in a decent position. However, changing the y with the j would be no real solution, because 65% of the time the j is accompanied by an i. And typing -iy- is not nice at all.

I'm not gonna switch around more keys just to take care of  this little annoyance, the solution (ii -> ij) works perfectly imo. It's just something to keep in mind if someone creates a colemak version especially for the Dutch language.

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When numbering paragraphs, minuscle roman numerals are sometimes used. How would your trick handle this?

i)
ii)
iii)
iv)
etc

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I pretty much never use those, and if I really need to it's still pretty easy.

type ii [it changes to ij] press delete [j gets deleted] type i [it does not change now], and voilla, you have ii. It now takes 4 presses to type ii, instead of 2, so no biggy.

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Ah, I see. That kind of thing would end up annoying me though, but then again I tend to type odd stuff like 'gladii' and 'legionarii'. Old war injury.

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First test in a couple of weeks/months

47k0SjV.png

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I type the same language (Dutch). Regarding the letter IJ.  You might know that the digraph IJ is an official typographical letter. IJ and ij  are Unicode symbols U0132 and U0133. In monospace letters it looks better too. Here are some words, first typed i + j  later as one symbol.

a b c d IJs. Fijn ijs, mijn ijzer
........12345678901234567890

a b c d IJs. Fijn ijs, mijn ijzer.
........12345678901234567890

Here it is in monospace, now you 'll see a difference

a b c d IJs. Fijn ijs, mijn ijzer.
........12345678901234567890


a b c d IJs. Fijn ijs, mijn ijzer. 
........12345678901234567890

- solution 1: remap Y to IJ . Use AltGr Y to type Y.  If you switch a lot between Dutch & English, you might make 2 variants of Colemak, one with Y, one with IJ

- solution 2: use a free key for IJ. For instance Colemak ;

I have looked into those solutions but found them too complicated in the end.

Last edited by pieter (27-Jul-2015 13:40:55)
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Yes, well. I actually hate typographical digraphs. In my opinion, they should be automatically generated by word processors and handled by computer code (which is tricky) but not typed manually. This goes for fl, fi, sz, sž, dž, ij and whatever other digraphs of similar nature we've made us. I'm undecided on the older ones that are actually written together like œ and æ; those should probably be allowed to live – along with digraphs that have turned into accents like ô (in French), ñ, ç etc.

It's silly to make the list of needed characters that much longer by combining various monographs. Single letters is the reason for the great success of the alphabet. ;-)

Last edited by DreymaR (29-Jul-2015 07:55:15)

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Finally Dreymar concedes, and wants some autocomplete action...

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Haha, yes for typographical characters in entry of proper text I'm a big fan. I don't envy the programmers that have to sort words with typographical digraphs in them, but it's of course doable. And it better stay away from my coding, as I do not want any curly quotes in my C (hard to notice and a game-breaker).

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