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I am very jealous of you -- my inability to maintain QWERTY after I switched to Colemak was what forced me to grudgingly switch back.

I just couldn't do it; after I became acclimated to Colemak, my QWERTY was just destroyed. I had to think about where the keys were in QWERTY, and I realized I don't even really know, because typing is a doing-without-thinking activity. So I ended up having to look, which is extremely inefficient and finally I abandoned Colemak. (I couldn't avoid QWERTY because part of my job these days entails showing people how to do things on their own computers, which aren't using Colemak.)

The same thing happened when I learned Japanese; I used to be conversant in Spanish, and after I got to roughly the same level in Japanese (from living in Japan) one day I noticed that the Spanish wasn't there anymore -- I would have to think about what I wanted to say in my native English and convert it to Spanish.

Seems like a way different thing, but it felt the same, because it was like an unconscious activity being supplanted by another, and thus becoming something I had to think about. Which broke it.

It made me sad though, because now typing QWERTY feels idiotic. Kludgey and stupid. Colemak didn't make me a significantly faster typist (maybe it would have had I done it for more than 9 months) but it was way more comfortable.

I use Dvorak, and I have almost no problems typing QWERTY. But this only came after I became completely fluent in Dvorak. When I still had to think to type Dvorak, I couldn't switch to thinking about QWERTY without getting all confused. Now I just peek a little at the keyboard with QWERTY, especially for non-alphanumeric symbols, but it's no problem.

Same story here. There was a time during my transition to Dvorak where I kept tripping myself up if I tried to type QWERTY, but once the Dvorak layout went into muscle memory QWERTY came right back without any special effort on my part. I still have to peek, but I had to peek before I learned Dvorak too (that's why I switched to Dvorak).

I had to abandon Dvorak because it killed my ability to do QWERTY. It was also an almost traumatic experience because when I was going through it I felt like I was going crazy or that I was just plain stupid. How could my brain possibly discard 20+ years of QWERTY after just a few weeks of Dvorak.

But having said that I recently learned that other people have had the same experience and so now I don't feel so bad and I want to change again.

/lifestory

That's quite interesting, as I've had an opposite experience (substitutions ahead). Switching to dvorak lifted my speed on it as well as qwerty, and my Japanese has only helped my French. There was certainly a lot of weirdness at the moment the two sides reached the same level– if I froze up for a second, I might start mixing in French words or reaching for Command-Q with my left pinky. The only real obstacle has been slowdowns from going 6+ months without using one or the other which isn't all that hard to work around. For typing, triggers are anything with a 'd' in qwerty including the word 'dvorak' ironically, 'the' in dvorak. With language, the rhythm and intonation are usually a dead giveaway. In your case however, the subjects are quite similar. Colemak is a change from qwerty, but it's not as overtly different from qwerty. That might make the transition easier, but it could be one of the reasons switching between them is hard. Spanish and Japanese is also an interesting combination as the sounds are, at times, quite similar (and not just due to the Portuguese loanwords, a la パン or カステラ). Perhaps your difficulty is in finding distinctive enough triggers.

Same experience for me. I felt bad about myself but I found out other people had the same experience. So buck up. I plan to give Dvorak another swing (that was my layout of choice.)

Fascinating about the phone. iOS only supports colemak on an external keyboard (or in a custom app) so I've not tried it there. You make perfect sense.

I made a move fairly similar to yours. I went for the Truly Ergonomic keyboard because laterally staggered keys seem stupid if you're giving up Sholes anyway.

I typed about 5-10 wpm for the first month. No matter what I tried, it was far too slow. Part of this was losing faith and moving keycaps (on mac keyboards) and putting letters on the TE. That gave me a crutch for a while that kept me slow, although I was careful to maintain hand position.

Then suddenly, it clicked, and I went from 15wpm to 50, then up to about 90. I'm still slower than I was with Sholes after 1.5-2 years now, but I can type on any keyboard and not have pain or tingling.

That said, I am back to about 5 wpm with Sholes, and I'm perfectly fine with it. Just as when I first switched to colemak, it makes my emails and documents much more brief. I think about dictating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and choose my words carefully.

(This was obviously typed on colemak. :-))

It took a long time to get used to emacs keybindings. I ended up using arrow keys for a long time. P and F are close enough that I ended up with a lot of confused misses.

What I like about colemak over Dvorak is that Dvorak is a pain for a lot of common unix commands. 'ls' is especially onerous.

Its not "fascinating" about the phone. It's 100% normal. You could say it's a pretty interesting turn of events in the history of keyboards however.

Qwerty was designed for typing machines (typewriters) where you needed enough space between keys so that the machine wouldn't jam. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter)

That's exactly why qwerty is better on the phone as well as fingers, like the metal tyepbar, can't type letters too close to each other. Except its flesh and bones instead of metal.

Actually I find that the hardest part about Colemak on the phone is being unable to distinguish the home row from the rest of the keyboard -- and if you can't touch type with fingers, using what's familiar (QWERTY) is easier. Thumb travel time is shorter than finger travel on full-size keyboards, after all.

That's precisely why I found it fascinating. :)

I use the Bépo layout (dvorak equivalent for French) on a TypeMatrix at work and a TrulyErgonomic at home.

I've had the same experience as you though, I switched to touchtyping, changed the layout, and the keyboard (columnar) at the same time, so I can always switch back to an AZERTY (french QWERTY), but only on a regular standard keyboard (and it's a pain to use BÉPO on a non-columnar keyboard, slow and lots of mistakes).

As for the speed, well, I was around 70wpm on AZERTY, and now (around 4 years later), I'm around 100wpm on BÉPO, so yeah, I'm never going back.

I've also tried Colemak on my Android and iOS devices ... it's only useful for attaching physical keyboards -- at least when on a phone. A tablet might prove different, and I'd confirm with my Surface Pro, except I like its QWERTY touch keyboard better than the Colemak layout which isn't as touch-optimized in on-screen styling. I wish Windows 8.1 had Colemak built in. Apple's had it built-in since Lion.

it took me a year from when i first started trying to learn colemak to actually completing it, had a 6month break in the middle, and many lapses, but after doing the trainer program for 10min for 2 weeks i fully switched and it went OK. I use it on my smartphone too, in the beginning i also had that thought that maybe it's worse on smartphones, but using swiftkey i haven't noticed all that much problems, only for words that look alike and have the same first letter, so usually when i get the first letter right the rest can be all wrong but it will still guess the right word.

I just switched to colemak using SwiftKey and I'm loving it. It's tough to avoid autocomplete.

Interestingly, the home row issue you experienced on the phone is rather similar to the reason qwerty was invented in the first place, to avoid key jamming on mechanical typewriters.