so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep reading about CW and how people swear by it and im kind of curious about learning it but i have no idea where to even start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way to do it. i downloaded some app a while back but it felt really random and i gave up after a week. i think my problem is i dont know if im doing it the right way or just wasting time. is there a specific order you're supposed to learn the letters or does it not matter. sorry if this is a vague question i genuinely dont know enough to ask it better

okay so the biggest thing i wish someone had told me early on is to NEVER learn it visually. like dont sit there memorizing dit dah dah is W on a chart. your brain will hit a wall around 10-12 wpm and you'll have to relearn everything anyway. the whole idea with Koch method is you start with just two characters, K and M i think, and you copy them at full speed like 20wpm right from the start but the spacing between letters is stretched way out so you have time to think. then you add one letter at a time as you get accurate. it sounds weird but it works way better than starting slow and trying to speed up later.

for actual resources, lcwo.net is free and its basically the Koch method in a browser. a lot of people also use the Just Learn Morse Code software though i think thats windows only. give it more than a week though, like seriously the first month feels like nothing is sticking and then one day it kind of clicks. i was probably 6 weeks in before i stopped hating it

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been trying on and off for a few months. i use an app called Morse Mania which is at least a little more structured than some of the random ones. what helped me more than anything though was just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i could barely copy anything, just to hear what real CW sounds like at different speeds. there's also some W1AW practice broadcasts you can tune into on HF if you have a general or extra, or i think you can stream them online somewhere. not sure i'm the best person to give advice since im still pretty slow but just wanted to say youre not alone in finding it confusing at the start