MichaelPeep
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I do note that you conflate two distinct issues: whether touch-typing is worth learning, and whether Dvorak is a meaningful (or any) improvement over QWERTY. I am definitely far more suspicious of the latter claim than the former (see my link in the grandparent for a thorough debunking).
Even the studies cited by the author in your link show a speed advantage of around 5% for Dvorak over Qwerty. Considering my point of the 10k hours, the payoff is more than worthwhile, before even taking RSI into consideration.
On a side note, one of the reasons I decided to learn touch-typing was because I have some free time at the moment and was looking for something else to do than read blog posts all day, so I totally agree with you that investing 30-40 hours now might not be the best for everyone... TDT probably recommends it though.
While we don't spend all our time in front of a computer typing, it does seem to represent a non negligible portion of our days. Assuming an hour a day of typing on average for the rest of your life, the time you will spend typing is tens of thousands of hours.
I'm currently learning Dvorak and it looks like it's going to take about 30-40 hours to be able to type properly. So the gains in efficiency don't have to be very significant to pay off.
To check how efficient the time investment is I checked my typing speed. Like you, probably, I'm not a touch typer but I felt like I... (read more)
After having finished the basic course in Dvorak and touch typing for a few weeks now, here is an update on my results: I spent a total of 30 hours learning to touch type, but even once I could touch type properly, I was still really slow, at about 20 wpm immediately after finishing the lessons, half of my original speed. Ten days later, after forcing myself to avoid the QWERTY layout which resulted in some inconvenience, in particular with keyboard shortcuts, I am now typing at about 30 wpm in Dvorak, which is still significantly slower than my previous, unconventional but obviously not so bad, typing in QWERTY.
The idea that I... (read more)