[scandinavegan]

I practiced qwerty touch typing in school, but never really used it myself, rather using two-three fingers on each hand and letting them move around a lot across the keyboard.

I switched to dvorak over 10 years ago and since the letters on the keys didn't match, and because it's designed to make it easy to touch type, I quickly learned.

But after a year or so of dvorak, I grew tired of being extremely slow when I had to switch back to qwerty when using a shared keyboard in a conference room (imagine reading and hitting single letters in a meeting in front of people), so I switched back to qwerty. I thought that my new touch typing skill would transfer, but it didn't. I still try now and again to properly touch type, but it's slow and with a lot of mistakes. So this practice site looks very interesting to me as well!

Some people say that they can easily switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak, but it turns out that I couldn't. I still miss the speed and ease of dvorak, but I also enjoy being able to quickly use any keyboard now.

[Arelius]

I had a similar experience switching to the Kinesis. I mean I don't think as stark as yours.

I noticed the Kinesis Advantage forced my hands into a position that encouraged touch-typing, so I thought I'd give it a try and learn to touch-type while doing my normal work (Still QWERTY though) It worked! I can now touch-type greatly...

Sort-of, it really only applies to the Kinesis though, when I go back to a normal staggered layout keyboard I go back to my two-three finger pecking around the keyboard.

It's obviously still the same layout, so I don't think I experience it as bad as you do on a standard keyboard, but now I'm pretty much stuck on my Kinesis!

[Symbiote]

I added the Dvorak layout to the computer in the conference room.

(This is probably a more acceptable thing to do in companies where more than one language is spoken. The computer already had English-Qwerty and Danish-Qwerty installed.)

[sajforbes]

I have a similar issue! When I learned Russian I installed the Russian keyboard layout on my computer. Because my keys (obviously) didn't match, I had to type by feel using a small diagram I printed as a reference, carefully placing index on f and j like you're supposed to. I just touch type in Russian now, but if I dare do that while typing English I stumble and lose track; I'm stuck doing it my normal messy (still faster than average) way.