As you say, the words are quite rare, and this is all statistically expected (it's just the nature of the game).

"Difficulty", on the other hand, is a highly subjective matter depending on your layout and the words you are already familiar with (at your current skill level). Other people with different layouts and/or different skill levels and/or a different training program may find the same words that you find difficult to be easy, regardless of whether they are rare. It would therefore not be reasonable to delete a sentence that one person finds difficult and another person finds easy.

So, in the rest of this email, I will try to give you some ideas for how to type these words more easily in Colemak.

These wards are indeed rare (each occuring once in every 100,000 words), but in terms of typing difficulty in the Colemak layout, they are all about average. In other words, they are not a problem for the hands, it is only a matter of training the mind. I suggest breaking words into chunks. e.g. "Tux" "edo", and master the ability to type any chunk with ease. I love long (quasi) compound words like "orthonormal" and "wonderful" because they are usually made up of familiar components. It only takes two clicks of mental processing to prepare for a word like "orthonormal", because I view this as two chunks. I have no idea why a word like "protocol" might be difficult. But I will suggest this. Try typing that word over and over and over and over... again until you're fingers become familiar with the pattern, and you will eventually see that it presents no problem for the fingers - only for the unfamiliar mind.

Once again, I personally don't find any of these words difficult to type in Colemak. Although, these are interesting examples in that names of foreign places, animals and random numbers are likely to be new words that you haven't encountered before. To find these words easy to type you do need to develop a skill in being able to type unfamiliar words. Again, I would suggest "chunking".

I can imagine how difficult this might be for anyone who has not perfected their use of "shift". The way to type it is this: type "Humor in the Court" hold SHIFT ": Q:" It is even likely that the next letter will also fall under the shift meaning that the cost is only a single shift.

Ok, the difficulty of this is relative to your keyboard layout. I personally never accepted the idea of removing the CAPSLOCK key. If you still have one, then you can do this very easily: CAPSON "I/O, I/O, " CAPSOFF "it's off to work we go".

The words may be unfamiliar, but that can be solved using chunking: "Te" "cum" "seh" "shaw" "nee". Hence, even if you have never seen these words before, you should eventually be able to type such unfamiliar words without stumbling.

This sentence has some difficult SHIFTing, so you will likely need to pause around the Q and ! while performing the shift. The only thing I can say here is that such difficulties sometimes happen. It helps to recognise what is difficult and what is not, so that you can plan to slow down and speed up (as you would around a speed hump).

Note that all of the words in this example are extremely frequent words. Whatever is tripping you, it would probably a good thing to practice this very example until it no longer trips you. I find this example to be a very fast one.

I actually follow a non-standard practice here and type '-' with whatever finger feels best prepared at the time, sometimes my middle, ring or pinky finger. For a double '-' I use a stronger finger such as my ring or middle finger. Anyway, using that technique, I find it quite fast to type --.

It's not that bad on Colemak. Think about it this way: it's almost like typing "Heavon" but with your pinky shifted a little bit to the right.

Chunking: "Whad" "top" "hats"

"Dust" "in" (or "Dus" "tin"),  "Far" "num", etc.

# leaves the left hand in the right proximity to type 12.

Practice the above and you will find it is not difficult for the fingers, only the unfamiliar mind, and that can be solved with practice.

Well, 3 minutes is only 50% different from 2 minutes, whereas all of the other tests are at least 100% different from each other.

This is a great feature idea and I'd really like to implement it, but it will be a while before I have time to, I think. First, I have some other work that needs to be done over the next few months. After that, people really want me to add "multiplayer" as the next new feature. I've decided I'll start development on this as soon as the membership reaches 3000 (which will hopefully give me enough time to complete my current work).

Another suggestion for the highscore list would be to show a list of recent highscores in addition to the all-time bests. This, too, along with player averages and listing the vicinity of your own best, would encourage the less-than-elite players to compete. I can never touch the top 30 at the 2-minute test; in fact, as you know that test is now so old that all the top 30 scores are in the high elite range. But I might make the day's best list - at least, until the whiz kids log on, heh! - and that'd encourage daily play. This is another thing the Key Hero test uses, and with good effect I feel.

I know that you post new personal bests on the chat and that's cool, but not the same.

Good idea! Moving from 'C+' to 'B-' would feel like a more tangible achievement. Reminds me of Typing Of The Dead, where you had school-type marks based on various aspects of your typing.

You're absolutely right and I even thought of that myself. So, maybe local list in addition to the global one is the better option. (I've been playing on the PS3 network lately and was excited even to move up from position ~600,000 to ~500,000 in a Little Big Planet level!) And/or a 'school marks' system based on your score's percentile of the score population distribution. Both are fairly flashy and tangible, and wouldn't be too hard to implement I'd think.

'Congratulations - your score of ### WPM merits a B- ranking! The grand result for the last ## tests is ### WPM and a C+ ranking.'  :)