Hello Colemak community :)

First off I'd like to share my experiences: I'm currently a senior in college and been typing on QWERTY for pretty much my entire life. My typing speed is typically around the 130-140WPM range, and in order to save my wrists in the long run I've been looking into alternate typing layouts.

I started using Dvorak about a week ago and managed to get up to around 40WPM. I started Colemak yesterday (however I haven't had as much time to practice as I did with Dvorak last week), done with the home row and currently in the process of learning the top row ;). After that the bottom row should be the easiest I hope. Although I'm not noticing the difference as much between Dvorak and Colemak compared to QWERTY and Dvorak/Colemak, they are still both significantly better than QWERTY.

I probably need a bit more time with Colemak in order to observe some of the benefits it has over Dvorak, but so far I have noticed a major (sarcastic) downside: the J-O and H-N-E sequences used in my name involve a wide movement and same-finger movement, respectively. 'Joshua' feels easiest in Dvorak ;)

Onto my second topic:

As a Japanese major, I type in Japanese occassionally, currently using an IME through Romaji input. I've tried the various layouts with regedit fixes (as well as in Ubuntu where the IME automatically adapts to layout changes) and was wondering which layout would be optimal for Romaji input.

Without a second thought, I would have assumed that Dvorak would fare better because of the vowel isolation in the left home row, perhaps encouraging hand alternation between consonant/vowel in Japanese. For long vowels I also found it easier in Dvorak, for example the long 'o' sound is 'ou', both on the home row in Dvorak whereas the 'u' in Colemak is on the upper row. However a big problem with the Dvorak layout again involves same-finger movement: in the worst case is the sequence 'kyu', but the same arises for any vowel following 'ky'.

I'm wondering what the community's thoughts are on this. :)