"+Kelvin Chang Sorry, to be clear I meant bilingual keyboard proficieincy -- Qwerty and Dvorak. I know a guy who switched to Dvorak for ergo reasons too, and he says it worked for him, so that could be a good reason. I wonder if you'd just typed slower with Qwerty if it would have helped. :)
I do find it insulting every time I look at Qwerty layout. The worst thing is that here in Europe, they degrade it even further if possible by shrinking the left shift key to half width so you must stretch even farther with your pinky to reach it, and they do the same with the return key on the right side. Bah!
I eagerly await the day when something more efficient than keyboard typing will arrive, but I fear I'll have to wait for the direct neural interconnect. Voice typing has plenty of limits, too."
"+Stephen Shankland Interesting. I've only typed in English (US), so I'm not aware of the issues with bilingual or foreign languages. However, I learned Dvorak not to improve performance (I actually lost some typing speed), but it completely eliminated the finger & wrist pain I experienced from years of QWERTY touch typing (thank you IRC). :)"
"+Kelvin Chang I taught myself Dvorak a bunch of years ago. It's not worth it. Whatever marginal performance improvements you get you rapidly lose because you have to deal with 500 other keyboards in your life that aren't Dvorak. Bilingual touch-typing isn't impossible, but in practice I don't see Dvorak as worth investing in. Also, as a practical matter, he's 7 years old and they've already started teaching him touch typing in school."
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