Welcome to the world of Colemak!  Everything seems a bit strange at first but you'll come to love it.

Dvorak is fine and all, but I'm always surprised when brand new switchers choose it over Colemak.

I feel your pain, I went through a similar difficult experience. I'm guessing from your previous Qwerty speed, like me, you weren't using the proper touch-typing technique previously. The great think about Colemak is it pretty much forces you to start using a good technique. So in addition to more comfortable typing, you should also end up with better, less strain-inducing technique, and be a faster typist too. So, yeah, keep with it. In a couple of months or so, it will all have been worth it.

Regarding keeping Qwerty ability - I did the opposite of you. I felt that trying to hold on to Qwerty would make it more difficult to internalize Colemak. I didn't even want to look at Qwerty board!  On the other hand, others do prefer to remain "bikeyboardial" (is that a word?), so it can work.

Obligatory plug: If you are having difficulty with D (or G) and don't object to deviating from classic Colemak, you could always consider Mod-DH, or even simply do a D>P>G switch.

If you're only 11 days into Colemak, don't expect your muscle memory to do you any favours in a while. You wouldn't expect to learn the piano in 11 days, I guess? ;-)

If the switch is irksome, you could always reconsider using Tarmak?

The mod-DH variants are easy enough to use if you use my Linux/XKB files. I hope. Let me know if you run into any trouble.

Switching to Dvorak now doesn't really make that much sense. It's a bridge too far, lots of unnecessary key changes that don't make life easier. Yes, installed in Windows but community support for Colemak probably is better these days. Today, there are simply better options. It's quite all right to stick with Dvorak if you already type it of course.

Swapping T and F would mean bigram trouble. Colemak is quite finely tuned, so if you let keys switch fingers you'll likely run into annoying trouble further down the road. As an example, FC/CF is a difficult bigram pair on Colemak, but rare. Your suggestion would mean making the much more common bigram CT difficult, which is a bad bad idea.

I'd say you're pretty fluent BPH! You just have high goals. ;-)

Well, I don't really want to rehash over the same arguments, and I'm not saying Dvorak is bad - since I have never even tried it, I'm not in a position to comment.  In fact there are some aspects of it that I like the look of.

When I was doing my layout research, I dismissed Dvorak it immediately. Changing keyboard layout is such a difficult transition, without making life extra tough for yourself by choosing such a hard layout to learn. That's why I'm surprised that new users would choose it - learning it looks to me like the self flagellation of keyboard layout switching.

The alternating style of Dvorak is often mentioned. What does this mean precisely? Is the claim that, for every left-hand key, it is better if the next following key is right-hand, and vice versa? I can see how not having long sequences on the same hand is a good thing, but then, Colemak doesn't (generally) suffer much from that either.  In summary what I'm really asking is: Is there a well-defined quantified measure of what is meant by "alternating"?

Sigh. We can aspirate at each other until the cows come home, ostensibly.

Dvorak has alternations, Colemak has rolls, they're both very good. Dvorak has some blemishes and absurdities (and they both mistake the middle trench for top quality locations which may be remedied by a Curl mod), but all in all it comes somewhat down to preferences.

Except. Dvorak moves too many keys and consequently becomes needlessly hard to learn. Much less bang for the buck, for a result that's almost but not quite as good as Colemak (for most – yes, I really really believe that!). And don't give me any of that "but it's just as simple because I believe" because I'm just not buying that. Complex things are harder to learn than simple ones, muscle memory or not.

In hindsight, some have claimed that maybe Dvorak has too much hand ping-pong, and maybe Colemak could've had a little more. The ideal may be short rolls on alternating hands most of the time? Or, again, that may be somewhat up to preferences?

I think that Colemak may be the one-handed winner: Using my mirror layouts, you can use the Colemak you already know. With Dvorak, there are two separate one-handed layouts that would have to be learnt whenever you hurt your hand. Maybe you can type faster in the end with a one-handed Dvorak layout; I wouldn't know. But for a short-term one-handed solution I'll wager Colemak (mirrored) is great.

Good News!
It's middle of the week Wed Jan 1st 2017 and my rating on Typeracer is up from 13 on Friday to 19 Words a minute. Yes I know it's not a speed to brag about but it's progress.

This is with me typing all day long at work and practicing in Typeracer and Sense

The bad news is that I'm in the twilight world of being slow on Colemak and no longer being able to type Qwerty.

I've noticed that  new muscle memory is slowly developing.

i remember that feeling of looking into the abyss when i realised qwerty was gone and colemak was still a speck in the distance

trick now is not to fold

they did, though with the benefit of hindsight i can see i rushed through them needlessly

should have taken my time..

I'm stoked!
It's Thursday with one day to go for my Friday weekly status.
So far the week went very lackluster. I was staying around 23 -24 words a minute.
Felt like I hit a brick wall. No progress.

Then on work break this afternoon I went into Typeracer. I started jamming. Got my first score in the 30s which was
32 and began scoring in the high 20's my average speed is up to 27 with accuracy in the 90s.

The 32 score was so encouraging.
Until you see it done, you can't believe that it can be done! I did it once and 'll be doing it regularly very soon! [ I hope ]

I'm going to go a different practice route tonight, I'm going to go Gonzo on Senslang and play meteor shower until I drop
tomorrow let's see if I can reach 30 which will be a 30% increase!

Just had to go on a co workers computer and Qwerty looked like a foreign language.
Decided to one finger type so as not to mess with my new Colemak muscle memory.

I'll have my Friday Update Later in the Day but currently I'm at and have reached a bar of 27 words per minute. just can't seem to rise above it.

But I just realized something that's encouraging.
Once you are above 24 WPM Typeracer goes from beginner mode to intermediate mode and the phrases become longer and  more difficult.

So intangibly an increase from 23 WPM beginner to 27 WPM is substantially more than a 18% increase probably closer to a 30% -40% increase.
taking into account the difficulty Level.

Hey I started cold turkey on Jan 10,  24 Days later I'm 27 words a minute which is the bottom end of Typeracer average typist. I'm able to do my job/work typing adequately.

Don't know if this is considered good progress but I'm Joe average two left thumbs, so if I can do it anyone with a little desire and willing to put in some work can learn Colemak in a relatively short period of time. I'm not saying my progress is exceiient,only that the road to typing adequately with Colemak isnt  super long.

It doesn't matter if you have two left thumbs, as due to the rubbish design of standard keyboards, only one thumb ever gets used!!!

Yeah, keep going. I found that at around the 40wpm mark, it started to gel and feel comfortable, and you are pretty close to that point now.

i would argue that alternating thumbs based on the last letter typed is not correct, because it depends just as much as the NEXT letter as it does the previous

some of the fastest typists in the world at 150-200wpm use only one thumb

of course, acquiring MORE technique is never a bad thing, so if you want to learn how to thumb with both fingers, go for it