Context
I've always been a fan of unconventional mobile keyboard layouts as I believe that lazily porting the qwerty keyboard layout onto a mobile phone touchscreen is just not it. I've began tinkering with various experimental & unconventional mobile keyboard layouts since 2023(?), though this journey is something that I feel is much more suited as its own post, so I will not go into any more depth regarding it, but to sum it all up, the main reason as to why I decided to pick up learning an alternate keyboard layout (akl) on a physical keyboard was because of the lack of new experimental mobile keyboard layouts.
I was unable to find any more mobile keyboard layout that doesn't fully utilise the touchscreen functionality of a mobile phone, or in simpler term, most of them are just your simple keyboard app that just port the whole of qwerty onto mobile. At best you can switch up the keys, but it's not that I specifically hate typing qwerty on a touchscreen device, but moreso that I hate the concept of expecting users to type on mobile using any and all physical keyboard layouts.
Thus, I began looking into dvorak and whether I should actually learn it or not. Typing speed isn't really a main concern to me since my workplace nor my day-to-day activities demand heavy amount of typing, but regardless I decided to do my research anyhow just to hear what others have to say regarding it. Reddit was where I had spent most of my time reading about akl and weirdly enough, a lot of them seems to be quite persistent on calling dvorak bad and colemak peak. Worth noting that my knowledge of physical keyboard layout at that time was limited to dvorak in a way that I know that it exist, but the fact that a lot of these people are collectively calling it bad and colemak as good surely mean that I'm better off with colemak, right?
Colemak
I started my first day quite strong by going to colemak camp and just practising homerow for hours on end. Whenever I'd have to browse the web or send messages on Discord, I'd try to type it in colemak before at times giving up and switching back to qwerty for the rapid speed, please never do this lol. Anyhow, after about 3d of doing homerow, I finally felt brave enough to attempt the whole layout over on monkeytype, to which afterwards my daily habit consisted of me doing homerow on colemak camp for like 10-30 minutes before spending 2-5 hours on monkeytype.
This amount of training have resulted with me reaching 100wpm in only 19 days (60s e200). My training was by no means perfect, but I was quite happy with the result. Eventually I did surpassed 120wpm, which took me about 3 months worth of on & off training. Reaching 120wpm with colemak was my goal and after hitting it I just don't feel like training colemak anymore. thus I decided to give another layout a spin.
Dvorak
I'm somewhat neutral on it. Back when I was on dvorak, colemak didn't come pre-installed on windows, so I just felt like learning dvorak because I feel that it might be better for cases when I don't feel like typing qwerty in public pc plus it uses alteration typing method compared to colemak rolls, so I decided to pick it up to know whether I'd prefer it more over rolling or not.
My training was more or less the same as colemak. While I did enjoyed alteration a lot more than expected, it felt way worse than colemak and I kept being demotivated from fellow akl users saying that learning dvorak in 2025 is a waste of time since there are a lot better alteration layout that I could be using instead (eg: graphite & gallium) and honestly I somewhat agree. I ended up reaching 70wpm on it before deciding to soft-drop it in favour of another layout which I heard to be a "better" version of colemak.
Extra note: What I particularly like about dvorak though is the location of the punctuations as they are easy to reach, but come at the cost of heavy workload on your right pinky and ring fingers.
Canary
With my previous experience of having picked up 2 akl before this, I decided to make my training on canary to be a lot more relaxed. I opted to train it for only 10-30 minutes/day instead of hammering away at my keyboard for hours on end.
Day 1 started with me learning homerow before jumping to monkeytype on the same day. I removed any form of on-screen guide on my 3rd day and began grinding on monkeytype like before, albeit with a more relaxed manner. This method resulted with me reaching 80wpm in 20 days, not too bad if I do say so myself. Though for some reason, I decided to pick up another layout to learn alongside canary which honestly screw up with my learning so much since it's another layout with heavy emphasis on rolling.
Semimak
I pretty much speedran the training section by not having any form of on-screen guide after the 1st day. My memory with semimak is bit hazy. I did eventually reached 70wpm on it, but idk how long it took, though it certainly took longer than usual due to me constantly mixing up semimak and canary lol.
Extra note: Semimak installation on Windows is pretty unique in the way that it tries to maintain qwerty shortcuts despite the position being way off. For example, ctrl+c on semimak is ctrl+b, ctrl+a on semimak is ctrl+s, and so on. While some people may like this kind of thing, I'm particularly not too fond of it, thankfully enough you can remove it by editing the .klc
Conclusion
Nowadays I've changed my main layout from colemak to canary. While I'm still faster on colemak, something about canary just "feels right" to me. Though, I'd still recommend colemak to someone whos planning to learn an akl. It's easy to learn due to less keys being reshuffled, shortcuts are the same as qwerty, most people seem to prefer rolls over alteration (from what I've seen), and nowadays it even came pre-installed in windows 11.
As for any speed changes, qwerty is still my fastest layout by only a few wpm (130wpm 98%), though this is more or less just me lacking training + dividing focus on too much layout instead of focusing on just colemak or canary, but hey it's pretty fun and certainly is way more comfortable than qwerty. I can still somewhat type on qwerty, but nowadays typing on it just feels "ugly" and incorrect. It can be pretty hard to go back to qwerty once you've experienced typing on a layout that doesn't suck lol.
If you're interested in learning an akl:
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Some layouts may have different variants/versions of itself, using colemak for example, there are colemak-dh and colemak-qi. For colemak specifically, I'd recommend starting with vanilla colemak and if you find some words to be cumbersome to type on vanilla colemak (eg: the), then try looking into colemak-dh instead. Semimak also have another variant called semimak-jq which seems to offer better stats than semimak, though I've yet to try it out myself.
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There are 2 methods of learning when you're picking up an akl. First is cold turkey which is essentially just using your akl as your default layout, this can be frustrating at times, but the results will come in fast. If you feel like going for the long-run, then you can try the tarmak approach. Try to determine which training you want to do first before picking up an akl and if one method doesn't work, then maybe try the other one.
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If you're using the cold turkey approach, try to use your layout as much as possible. DO NOT switch it back to your original layout just because you're typing too slow than you expected, this is normal. By repeatedly doing this then you're not getting any training done on your akl.
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DO NOT re-arrange your keycaps around. the F and J keys by default will have a small "bump" on them which helps a lot when you just started typing and by re-arranging your keycaps, the bumps will be all over the place.
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DO NOT ignore accuracy. I've seen so many people just rush their typing which resulting with them getting 88% accuracy. If your accuracy is horrendously bad, then you should go slow in order to type faster. Making mistakes slow you down, so you'll make less mistakes by typing slower, resulting with higher wpm. I usually aim for 98% accuracy on my typing, but this might be too strict for some people, so try to strive for a middle-ground where you can get good enough accuracy with good enough wpm before slowly going up from there.
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Try to NOT be too overly-reliant on having an on-screen picture of the layout. I'd urge you to remove it as fast as you can as it will heavily hinder your growth and you'll be able to pick up the position of the letters rather quickly anyways, though having them fully memorised to be able to type efficiently might take a while
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The first few days will be hell, but it should be smooth sailing afterwards. You may also want to do some mental training by "typing out" words in your head with your akl. Despite all of that, DO NOT overtrain yourself. While my colemak experience have showcased me getting 100wpm in only 20 days, it also resulted with heavy straining and pain on my behalf, which was not at all pleasant. Thus instead of practising for hours on end, I'd instead recommend doing short (<=60 minutes) practises such as doing quotes or harder vocabularies on Monkeytype (eg: e1k or e10k, going above might feel bit redundant). Practising on Typeracer is probably pretty good as well since it's purely quotes, but I've never really bothered too much with it. so I can't really say for sure.
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You'll still remember qwerty, until you don't. If qwerty is still important to you then I'd recommend doing short 10 minutes training everyday in order to not forget it. Don't worry too much about phone typing though as the muscle memory thats required over there is different than on a physical keyboard, so you should able to type qwerty on mobile phone just fine. Worth noting that you SHOULD NOT change your mobile keyboard layout to colemak (or any layout with heavy emphasis on rolls). They aren't built with mobile typing in mind, so just stick with qwerty or even better, opt to using messagease or the likes.
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Lastly if you want to pick up an akl just because you think that it will make you type faster, then my advice is don't. Picking up an akl doesn't automatically give you a 25% speed buff since you'd have to put the effort to learn it, thus the amount of time spent learning a new layout is the amount of time you're not learning qwerty.