Maybe you weren't all that good with qwerty before? I always felt it's like learning an extra foreign language: learning French doesn't make your German worse.
I can type Qwerty, Dvorak, and Colemak all over 100wpm (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mQ6iSYMMHv0). You definitely have to practice all three together if you don’t want to lose them.
Also happened with language learning. I speak English and Spanish natively. Learned Italian (very similar to Spanish) in high school. After college learned Chinese in China. One day I ran into an Italian person in China and tried to talk to them in Italian. I kept jumbling Italian and Chinese, even though on paper Italian is so much easier for me than Chinese. It was like my brain only had space for all native languages, and just one foreign language. I’m sure with practice I could speak both Italian and Chinese, but that’s the whole point of this comment. It takes practice to maintain them all.
If your speed did not fall it means you did not learn well.
I actually learned to type at school (yeah, funny business school my parents sent me to). We had an actual specialist teacher to teach us to type on electric typewriters using pretty nice methodology.
To learn to type well is to train "muscle memory". This means you think the letter and your body does it for you, automatically, without any part of your conscious brain involved.
I don't know where keys are on my keyboard. It is unmarked, so I can't look it up. If somebody asks me, I need to lay my hands on it and think the letter and see which finger "wants to" press the button. In that regard I am a passenger and once I think a word or sentence I don't have any further control -- it is some uncontrollable part of my brain that takes over and does it for me.
Even when typing at speed I am still free to think about anything else. Just as when you walk you don't need to think about walking itself and can concentrate on whatever else you want.
YMMV but after 3-4 weeks of dvorak, I actually did have difficulties when using qwerty. I gave up dvorak because I don't want to have to modify every keyboard/system I'm on, as opposed to just sitting down at a terminal and getting work done.
I think you might have tried a bit more. I'm typing this on my wife's qwerty laptop and have zero issues with blind typing on it, just a little more strain from having to move fingers more that it is possible on Dvorak.
I have to agree with the other poster. My typing speed was in the 70+ WPM on qwerty prior to learning dvorak, and now I'm a glorified hunt-and-pecker on qwerty keyboards.
The only exception to this is typing on my mobile device, which is configured to qwerty.
I could touchtype like crazy on qwerty before. It's possible because I learned dvorak when I was older - early 40s - I only have space in my brain for a single layout now..
It does actually. The time you spend practising French is time you are neglecting German and hence, your knowledge will decay. If it's not a long time you won't notice it (maybe some very specific words that you rarely use will be forgotten).
Any long-term migrant learns this over the years, sadly. Obviously you can still use the language, but the farthest borders of language-specific knowledge become frail and tend to fall off the edge of your brain. I now struggle to give "flourish" to my speech in the "old" language, and have to make a conscious effort to remember difficult words.
True. But you can't be isolated from QWERTY in the real world: my wife's computer uses it, as do a lot of computers out there, so I still do get practice with it from time to time.
