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Hi, I've been using Neo2 for a couple of years now, so maybe I can help you with these. Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks. You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :) It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning. I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row. Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1. |
At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge to far in a work environment.