A free 635-lesson typing course that teaches Dvorak properly, with finger guidance built for the Dvorak home row rather than QWERTY letters relabelled. Switch layout in settings and the whole course rebuilds around it.
⌨️ Switch to Dvorak 📚 Start the course
Dvorak rests your fingers on a o e u i for the left hand and d h t n s for the right. The raised bumps that let you find home position without looking are on u and h, not on F and J. If you have moved from QWERTY, that one fact is the first thing to unlearn: your index fingers are looking for different keys.
The idea behind the arrangement is that the five most common English vowels sit under the left hand and the most common consonants under the right, so ordinary words alternate hands instead of loading one. Typing "the", "and" or "this" becomes a left-right-left rhythm rather than a cluster of same-hand reaches.
Honestly: probably not by much, and not for the reason most people expect.
Dvorak does measurably reduce finger travel, and many people find it more comfortable over a long day, which is the reason most Dvorak typists give for staying. What the evidence does not support is a large speed win. The studies claiming one were mostly small or run by interested parties, and controlled comparisons put a trained Dvorak typist and a trained QWERTY typist close together.
The honest summary is that technique matters far more than layout. A touch typist on QWERTY will comfortably beat a hunt-and-peck typist on Dvorak. If you already type well on QWERTY and want to be faster, measuring your weak keys will get you there sooner than relearning the alphabet. If your hands ache, or you simply want to, Dvorak is a perfectly good reason on its own.
Expect two to four weeks before Dvorak feels natural, and a real dip before that. Typical experience:
Most people can keep both layouts once Dvorak is solid, in the way a musician keeps more than one instrument. Switching mid-learning is what makes neither stick, so it is worth committing for a few weeks.
This matters more than it sounds. Many typing sites support Dvorak by changing the on-screen keyboard picture while still teaching the QWERTY key order, so lesson one drills F and J on a layout where those are not home keys at all.
Our curriculum is defined by position rather than by letter. A unit says "the two index fingers", and the app resolves that against whichever layout is active. On QWERTY that is F and J. On Dvorak it is U and H. Every drill, every hand diagram and every finger prompt follows, and no lesson ever uses a key it has not taught you yet.
Because the word banks filter to the keys taught so far, the Dvorak course works out at 635 lessons against 629 on QWERTY. The pedagogy is identical. The letters simply arrive in a different order.
The same positional approach supports QWERTZ (German and Central European, with Y and Z swapped) and AZERTY (French, where the home row pinkies are Q and M rather than A and semicolon). Pick any of them in settings and the course rebuilds.
One thing that does not change on any layout is the number row, which is identical everywhere. Those drills are covered in number and punctuation practice.