My experience: Colemak slower than QWERTY and I am frustrated - Experiences

slowpoke
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Registered: 17-Jun-2008
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30-Jun-2008 06:05:59#1 My experience: Colemak slower than QWERTY and I am frustrated

I started touch-typing for the first time in my life slightly over 6 months ago in QWERTY. I reached 70WPM 3 months into my training and then I found Colemak and decided to try it because it looked better. The first month was great. I almost reached 50WPM with flawless accuracy and QWERTY had become a distant memory. Now, close to 4 months after trying Colemak, I am still stuck at 50 words per minute!

I tried Ryan Heise's tips and I tried Mac's lesson plans and suggestions. I did speed drills and rhythm drills and practiced the same way as I did with QWERTY. THERE HAS BEEN NO CHANGE.

I think the problem is that my pinkies are too slow to keep up with the rest of my fingers. When I try to rush my typing, my pinkies cannot keep up and I compensate by using my ring fingers and press R and I instead of A and O. I know that others experienced slowdown when they switched to Colemak and couldn't match the same speed but those people are long-time QWERTY users. I am totally new to touch-typing so I don't understand why I would slow down as well.

Is there a version of Colemak that puts less stress on the pinky? Am I doing something wrong? Are there others going through the same problem? Colemak is definitely more comfortable but is is because I'm typing much slower now?

I appreciate any and all advice.

makdaddyrak
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Registered: 14-May-2008
Posts: 103

03-Jul-2008 05:57:14#2 Re: My experience: Colemak slower than QWERTY and I am frustrated

hmm.. you didn't need to open a new thread to post pretty much the same thing you posted in your other thread.

Anyway, you do bring up a really good point about the pinkies. I am experiencing the exact same thing right now.

The worst part of this layout is the placement of the A and R columns. I'm also relatively slow transitioning from my pinky to my middle finger and back again. To slightly compensate for this weakness in the layout, I have actually started "rolling" my wrists to facilitate going from middle finger to pinky and back.

One solution to this "flaw" in the layout is to move the A to the other side, and have the layout be more similar to dvorak... but then, you'll end up having other problems like increased hand alteration and a lower number of combos available, etc.

The practical solution is to practise with words that make heavy transition between ring and pinky fingers - I remember typing "library" countless times to get used to the RAR roll.. it's still a weakpoint in my typing, but it's much better than before.