I’m typing this with my new ergo keeb right now. Holy fuck it is hard. I cannot seem to be able to hack my brain, I’ve spent 2 WEEKS desperately trying to learn the first SIX MOST FUCKIN COMMON LETTERS and I’m still completely unable to use them even remotely quickly or reliably. I am completely unable to even break the 70% confidence line on keybr on I,E,S and R despite hours of efforts. Worse, now my accuracy goes steadily down the toilet even if I slow down to a grind in an attempt to improve it.
I fuckin suck at this. It is despair and rage inducing. How the fuck do you manage to even learn new layouts?
I spent almost an hour typing this fuckin message.
But hey at least my keyboard looks awesome.
Edit: it seems using keybr is actually damaging my progress instead of helping. I’m switching to another tool.
Edit2: after a few days on monkeytype I’m up to 17 WPM and 91% accuracy in french, up from 4 WPM and almost negative accuracy. Not great BUT it’s still a big win for me. I mostly know my layout now, except for the dev layer. I can only progress from now.
Oh, and keybr is brutal and frustrating. Personally, I don’t like it and wouldn’t recommend it. Others do, so that seems to differ.
I remember using it for fun in my QWERTY-times and drilling the same key on a pinkie got me stuck on 98+% confidence over and over and over and over again so I got pain and cramps. I told me it’s not what I would consider improving my typing but want out of my life.
Typing accurate but slow had me repeat the same keys again and again. Typing fast but with very bad accuracy got me through all the keys in no time.
That’s stupid. It’s harmful to your typing skill and makes you feel bad, physically and mentally, when you should just enjoy the new hobby! I hate keybr.
When learning Colemak I therefore switched to https://first20hours.github.io/keyzen-colemak for which exist many forks, probably also for your layout. Makes you type the letters, learning one after the other. If you mistype, it has you type the wrongly pressed and missed key repeatedly correct before it proceeds to the next letter.
Once I could locate all the keys well I used https://gnusenpai.net/colemakclub to engrave the homerow and additional letters in increasing stages.
Today I still use those sites to refresh key positions or as a warmup exercise.
After that came monkeytype 1k (skip 200!), always correct errors, always retrain mistyped words.
I use english 1k, 100 words and only aim for accuracy with currently 99,82% avg acc. Speed improves all by itself, but it does not interest me (yeah, it does, because it is shoved in your face just everywhere, but I know being accurate is my true metric)
Don’t rush, there are no prizes of meaning to win on any site. What you gain and may keep are the many new skills: a cool new layout, focused typing, improved concentration, better frustration tolerance, better stress resistance, well developed confidence and a proudness of what you have achieved all by yourself.
Currently I am training with https://problemwords.com and Amphetype (automatically fail and repeat a lesson if below 98,5% acc, considering higher but some interpunctuation is really hard) but I am revisiting all of the above to get a mixture.
Wow thank you!! I was finally able to drill the entire keyboard after less than an hour and already feel a little less uncomfortable…
I feel keybr is actually much more damaging than helpful. The keys that I drilled the most (I, S and R) are the ones I feel the least comfortable with. I keep mixing them up.
I’m truly very happy to hear that you found a tool which helps you!
Just keep in mind to be focussing extremely and solely on accuracy, no speeding, no bursting.
Drill the keys, the rest happens by itself.
(Up to a speed where you can comforatbly type. Then and only after that, come the specialized trainings for 2/3/n-grams, burstings, read-aheads, finger swaps, etc. - but you need an extremely solid basis for that, where even complicated words just flow out of you without any thinking. Pace yourself, get to at least a constant and repeatable 60 wpm with 99,5+% accuracy on a bad day first before going further)
Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, doctor, mechanic, milkman or whatever. People are different and different things work for different perks. I am just telling my personal experiences and the learning plan I chose for me (which probably is ultra-conservative) but which I believe fits my style and brain.
Oh, that colemakclub one is more pleasant to use than colemak.academy which I used before. I’ll also certainly check out they Keyzen one, there might be something to that as well.