O-REW 6: learn.dvorak.nl

Dvorak. Everybody knows what it is. You probably heard about it in elementary school and boasted about knowing that there was an alternative keyboard for QWERTY to all of your classmates, and kept on swearing to learn it so that you would appear cool and scientific and cultured and intelligent. But, you didn’t – you just never had the time or commitment.

I was the same (minus the boasting and cool part – we all know I’ll never be cool), even going through a ton (e.g. three minutes after class one day) of trouble to convince my Keyboarding teacher to let me learn Dvorak instead of QWERTY, but the year ended before I could even start to find a program.

Fast forward to now, a summer in which I swore to finally learn Dvorak, starting from scratch.

So I searched ‘learn dvorak’ on Google…

and learn.dvorak.nl (a Netherlands domain) was the first result.

(As you can tell, German is much harder to type than English…)

It’s deviously simple – really, there’s only one page and five exercises. All you do is type. You type whenever you want, however you want. It’s just a page with 100 random words on it.

Meh, I thought. Might as well try it…

So I started this exactly a month and a week ago, some weeks doing an exercise a day, others not visiting the website at all.

In half a month I could type Dvorak.

This entire post has been typed in Dvorak.

I type at an average of ~37 wpm using Dvorak (three tests at 38, 36, and 36 using this webpage; I type at ~111 wpm with QWERTY at 143wpm, 90wpm, and 100wpm).

This may not work for everybody, but it worked for me.

Try it!

(P.S. Ctrl Z, X, C, and V aren’t positioned in the same row or even close to each other in Dvorak, so that may mess with some people’s functions. Just switch to QWERTY if you’re going to repeatedly undo?)