I learned dvorak by printing out the layout and glancing over at the paper while typing back in high school. It took me about a month to get comfortable and I'm now basically a touch-typing bilinguist (though I'm slower at qwerty, it's more mental effort to do the conversion on the fly since my muscle memory is dvorak).
I did the same thing! And I'm embarrassingly slower at qwerty now.
The best part for me was when I first started having dvorak reflexes on a qwerty keyboard.
Nice learning hack.
Agreed. I'll add that if you can't touch-type, your keyboard layout is the least of your problems. Take a few days off and learn.