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    Help Shape the Colemak Typing Course on Ustaad Typing Academy

    • Started by Fazal Zubair
    • 2 Replies:
    • Reputation: 1
    • Registered: Yesterday
    • Posts: 2

    Hey everyone ?

    We are currently working on building a Colemak typing course for Ustaad Typing Academy – a multilingual typing platform that allows users to learn on custom layouts, including Colemak.

    Before finalizing the structure, I’d love to get your insights and experiences to make this course truly helpful for new learners and switchers.

    ? At Ustaad, we support multiple learning methods:

    ? Key-by-Key Method – introducing a few new keys at a time with repetition and practice.
    ? Pangram-Based Lessons – meaningful sentences that use a wide range of letters.
    ? Frequency-Based Approach – teaching the most-used keys and combinations first.
    ? Custom Challenge Modes – drills, games, or reflex-based typing tests.

    ?️ I’d love to ask the community:

    What method helped you the most when learning or switching to Colemak?

    Are there any specific strategies or creative ideas you'd recommend we implement?

    Would you like to see finger-training visuals or gesture guides included in early lessons?

    We’ve already created a full typing course for QWERTY, which is currently live and completely free to use.
    You can try it out here: USTAAD Typing Academy
    The upcoming Colemak course will follow a similar structure, but we want to make it even better with your help!

    The goal is to make this course simple, efficient, and beginner-friendly, especially for those transitioning from QWERTY.

    Your feedback can really help shape this into something valuable for the entire community.

    Thanks in advance – looking forward to your suggestions!

    Fazal Zubair
    From the USTAAD Typing Team

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    • Reputation: 220
    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,392

    That's exciting news! I should take a look at this when I have time.

    My own preferred training methods are delineated on the BigBag Training page, but my daily routine is described under "Still … What Do YOU Use?" on the front page. There's also a section on typing games on the "Trickery" page.

    I'm not a proper speed typist, as 80 WPM or so seems to be my (glass?) ceiling for full text typing. But I have a lot of mileage and experience with the communities, and I've listened to and talked with some of the best we have. So please take a look around the BigBag.

    Basically, what I've found very useful for learning and training has been:
    – Pangram training a la Sophie, for the initial learning phase (kudos for including that).
        – I prefer "The quick brown fox...", as it features the common 'THE' twice.
    – A round or two of MonkeyType, with the 10k word list and Zipf for pseudo-realistic typing. For speed training.
    – BurstType, to train typing single words fast.
    – Typecelerate, to analyze and focus on weak n-grams.
    – EnterTrained, to rack up mileage while reading interesting books so it never gets boring.
    – The occasional typing game, which also trains various aspects in an entertaining way.

    What I haven't wanted to do, unlike many other learners who use Keybr, is a strict key-by-key approach. I guess that's just too boring for me? Also, with the pangrams I quickly learnt the key positions and could progress to learning actual common bigrams which is what you really need to get in place for efficient typing. I also hear that Keybr users grow frustrated after a while, as progress slows down a lot and drilling a letter becomes a drudge once you've learnt the first ones.

    In fact, I think that the "most used keys" approach is less useful than people think. The most frequent keys may give you most stress initially, but then they cease to do so while the less common keys keep tripping you up for a much longer time. So I believe in training all keys more or less equally, or at least not ignoring the less common ones. Bigrams is an entirely different matter: There, I do believe in training the most common ones at first!

    Another issue is keys that not all key moves are created equal. Shai Coleman chose to move as few keys as possible between hands, and even between fingers where that was simple to do. I can attest to that: The R-S key pair is what trips up the most new learners, as they "castle" from their QWERTY positions (index-middle) to their Colemak ones (middle-index). And when trying out a Graphite variant coming from Colemak, the keys that swap hands (L F M P) and fingers (vowels) proved much harder to get in place.

    Last edited by DreymaR (Yesterday 09:55:51)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    • Reputation: 220
    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,392

    Quick feedback from a glance at your page:
    – It says "DAVORK Keyboard". I'm guessing you meant DVORAK?
    – Support for the aging Dvorak alt layout is necessary I suppose? I really wouldn't recommend it to new learners!

    Once we're talking about alt layouts, there's a problem of too few and too many! Once you include Colemak, the flood gates will feel a lot of strain as enthusiastic users want to promote their layouts of choice. Some of these choices are ill-informed, and will only confuse and frustrate newcomers in the end, but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

    Take a look at my two preferred intro guides to alt keyboard layouts: Getreuer's AKL guide and the Alt Layouts Quickstart document. Therein, you'll see a few suggested layouts that I agree with: Colemak(-DH) and Gallium/Graphite being the ones I'd suggest focusing on. You'll also see a warning against some of the better known "bad eggs": Overpromoted but underperforming layouts, that are known chiefly because of their tall claims and hard-working supporters.

    A major problem is that of division: If I say I can recommend, say, the Graphite layout, I'll also say a "but" or two: I wouldn't change the shift states of individual keys, as that makes key remapping hard (there's the Graphite-HB variant that doesn't do this – but it has some harder punctuation bigrams). And I'd personally suggest keeping Z on the lower row and J in the middle (that's the Gralmak variant – but it isn't well-known and popular). Others have other tweaks, there's a lot of those going around. The Gallium layout has two official variants (1 and 2, or colstag and rowstag if you wish; there's been a few minor tweaks over time too).

    Even for Colemak-DH there's divisions: For ANSI and ISO keyboards, it comes with Angle ergonomic mods that suit these physical keyboard variants. For ortho boards and similar, this ergo mod does not apply. So that creates the need for three different Colemak-DH variants, and ideally an explanation of which is which. And the vanilla Colemak, too, of course, bringing the total to four.

    Last edited by DreymaR (Yesterday 11:00:27)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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