Colemak: easy to learn, but it takes a year to learn it

There’s a discussion going on over on the Colemak forums at the moment, where user Phynnboi has said that he’s not impressed with it:

“Hype” may be a bit strong of a word, but basically, all the praise and attention the layout was getting (from here, hi-games, keybr, that DDvorak site, etc.), and how it was supposed to be so much more comfortable and elegant to type on than QWERTY, and how it was superior even to Dvorak, and how it had so many “finger rolls,” and heck, even a Slashdot story.  This all lead me to believe switching to Colemak was going to be some kind of transcendent experience–that every word would flow sweetly from my fingers like honey and I’d immediately refuse to ever go back to QWERTY because Colemak was just OMG so much better.  What I actually experienced was a layout that was better thought-out than QWERTY, but that still had considerable awkwardness about it.  Common trigraphs like YOU, THE, AND, AST, ION, and ING were all rather awkward to type.  The right pinky finger was hammered (seriously, QWERTY got it wrong by putting A on the left pinky–why compound that by also putting O on the right pinky?  We’re talking the 3rd and 4th most common letters on the two weakest fingers, here!  There’s more to keyboard optimization than minimizing same-finger!)

Saying one should spend a whole year with something they’re unimpressed with after 40 hours sounds like a common trick I’ve seen employed by fans of certain book, movie, and television series.  The argument is, dissenters don’t appreciate the series simply because haven’t spent as much time with it as the fans have.  The end goal is either to dismiss all dissenters (thus increasing the series’s positive mindshare), or to get the dissenter to invest as much time into the series as the fan has (thus increasing that series’s total mindshare).  Most recently, all the tween girls are using this argument with the Twilight series.  “Don’t judge the series by the first book/movie!  You have to read all four books several times to really get it.”  Yeah, right–let’s all go through the motions of being fans of something we’re not fans of.  *eye roll*

User keyboard samurai, who seems to be something of an Evangelist-In-Chief of the Colemak Religion, then proceeds to do exactly what Phynnboi is complaining about:

It really doesn’t come down to anything other than desire and attitude.   Just admit your desire to learn was so low that the first sign that it was NOT going to be like getting an instant download, you quit.  Consider you may simply  have read some enthusiasts who had a much higher desire to learn and therefore perceived the inevitable frustrations as relatively insignificant.

Er, just a minute, Mr Samurai — the whole point that Phynnboi is making is that “easy to learn” is one of Colemak’s biggest selling points. If it really lives up to all the marketing hype surrounding it, there are no frustrations, and it should most certainly be possible to come to a conclusion about it after forty hours of use.

Either Colemak is easy to learn, or you need at least a year to learn it properly. But not both.