that mentality is defeatist: that somehow you're not as good a learner as other people. its extremely unlikely that that is true.

whats more likely is that you're just using the wrong practice methods.

typing is all about grouping chunks of characters together and into your memory. grab a list of the most common words and n-grams. 'the', 'and', 'with', 'that', 'tion', 'ing', 'for'. you want to be typing those extremely fast. roll your fingers whenever possible. you want to commit these chunks into memory. you could think of it as, "I'm going to become the best in the world at typing the word 'different'." what would you need to do to accomplish that. you need to practice it until it becomes second nature that you don't even have to think about it. visualization helps. when away from the keyboard, visualize in your mind where the keys are and what fingers you will use to type the word "that" or whatever word you struggle with.

this is the perfect example of a poor practice method. don't practice full paragraphs that you struggle with. practice small words or phrases, one at a time. so if you want to learn the 'tion' 4-gram, just keep practicing that. then add a leading letter: 'ation', 'etion', 'ition', 'otion', 'ution', 'ption', get fast and comfortable with all of those combinations. then try the full words: 'station', 'motion', 'fruition'. youll notice that the start of those words you haven't practiced, so you will be slow for the first few letters, and then you'll speed through the 'tion' part that you practiced. thats good. practice it every day. if your hands get tired, take a break and freshen your mind by trying a new combination, say 'ent'. then 'went', then 'enter', progressing to 'movement'

you could try one of those 'mavis beacon teaches typing tutors' and things like that. they probably implement things like i described. its been 15+ years since i've used one of them. i think just repeating typeracer is a bad idea.

you're not a poor learner, you just didnt know how to practice properly. you were never taught the proper practice methods. most people weren't. probably the 'natural' typers or people who you think 'learn better' than you, they probably just stumbled upon better practice methods by sheer luck.

you could even record a video of yourself and i'm sure people would help critique your technique. maybe you're doing very bad things such as returning each finger back to the home row after every stroke. it may be unconscious and you dont' realize it

Yay, found it!

Check out my new topic on Amphetype training.

I hope it's okay that I quoted your insights there, misterW!

You know how proponents of alternative layouts always talk about QWERTY designed to slow down typing.? QWERTY typists claim it just a stupid myth, but I'm starting to think its true as I see my score on 10fastfingers.com go lower and lower.

It's interesting to note it talks about the sequence of typebars ended up being:

QA2ZWS3XED4CRF5VTG6BYH7NUJ8MIK9,OL0.P

Which obviously has frequent pairings, with some of these corresponding to the well-known Qwerty same-finger bigrams like DE and LO!

Makes me wonder how much better Colemak would have been  even on a old fashioned typewriter?

I'm still trying to figure out what is making me slow down when practicing on 10fastfingers.com

Every time my score is lower and lower.. From 47 down to 37 wpm... it frustrating.

May it be that 40WPM is just your speed? In my opinion, typing speed depends of the individual's nervous system more than of anything else. Do you know that many people are never try to learn touch-typing or they try and refuse to continue, telling that "this is not for me"? Looking around in my office (software company) I see not so many people who are doing fast touch-typing (I can count them on one hand), majority of colleagues are just brisk hunt-and-peckers, they are glancing to the keyboard for every third letter they type.

In my experience, typing a lot of text/books with Amphetype improves the flow. And then you can extract the most troublesome words and drill those.

For me, 'th' and 'wh' aren't so nice. Among my most damaging words are "with which this that their them whom daughter they when mother where other earth those". If you add 'the', you have a nice little list to generate drills from there.

Most of my mistakes are transpositions I think. I believe that the best way of getting rid of common transposition mistakes is to type those words a lot. One tip though: Using Extend, I try to always delete the whole word when I mistype. It's quite pleasant actually, not having to mash Backspace. And you get to retype the whole word correctly, which may aid proper learning.

You need to come back to the dork side! Feel the typing flow in you, feel it make you powerful, good, good...! :-þ

We have a Big Bag! We have joy and goodness! You have doubts. Make the right choice, my friend.

BTW: Image attachments are bad. img tags are good. ;-)

Can't seem to get my head around the fact that I'm being beaten by a keyboard layout. Although I will say that the only layout that I never struggled with was Dvorak. My accuracy was really good with it and so my speed as well.

I like the way that QWERTY is a bit left hand biased. I'm left handed but it does not seem to be making much of an impact on my current position.

At that point. I'd blame my tools!

I've worn out another Thinkpad keyboard, and a couple of keys now require a hard key-press and that's damaging both in terms of speed and my shoulder.  Could it be your keyboard/physical setup?

As others have said: concentrate on popular words and n-grams.   Simplify your practice and build up from the basics.  Even try going through a typing tutorial.  After that you'll be relieved to do 'normal' typing.

I'm agree to that 100%. What is especially sad is no efforts for research.
But regarding the QWERTY typing causing the RSI, I would say there is not enough statistical information regarding the alternative layouts. If everybody would use Dvorak or Colemak, then who knows, may be we would not know about typing related RSI at all. Let me the analogy, if a car is driving twice more, it's tires wear out twice faster and it needs oil change two times more often. It is the fact that qwerty typists have higher "mileage".

This is true also. AFAIK, users of old typewriters had less RSI issues than the users of modern computers. Their hands had great physical exercise every day, and there were no mice.
Tons of mouse alternatives exists - vertical mouse, trackball, touchpad, Contour roller mouse.
It is not a big challenge to master in alternative mouse for a person who committed to learn Colemak. ;)