so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, mostly just doing FM stuff on my handheld and a little bit of SSB on HF but i keep hearing people talk about CW and how great it is and i got curious. looked up a few things online and got completely overwhelmed. like there's the Koch method and Farnsworth and apps and youtube videos and people saying you need to just listen to real QSOs from the start and other people saying no dont do that yet and im just... lost honestly.

i dont have any military background or anything like that, never learned it as a kid, so im literally starting from absolute zero. does anyone have a suggestion for like a realistic path that actually worked for them? i dont need to be super fast i just want to eventually be able to have a slow QSO on 40 meters or something. is that realistic for a regular person with maybe 20-30 mins a day to practice

yeah 20-30 mins a day is plenty, honestly more than enough if youre consistent about it. the thing most people mess up is they learn the characters too slow and then they have to relearn the rhythm later. Koch method with Farnsworth spacing is the way to go — basically you learn each character at a fast speed like 20wpm but with extra space between them so you have time to think. the idea is your brain learns the sound of the letter not the count of dots and dashes.

LCWO dot net is free and works really well for this. just start with the default settings and dont move to the next character until you can get like 90% on the current set. some letters will stick immediately and some will haunt you forever (looking at you, C and Y for some reason) but it does work. i went from nothing to having my first actual CW QSO in about 4 months doing roughly what you described time-wise. wasnt pretty but it happened.

also dont bother copying onto paper at first, just say the letter out loud or in your head. the pen slows everything down when youre new.

morse trainer app on the phone is what i used, just kind of messed around with it during lunch breaks. took me way longer than 4 months lol but i also wasnt very disciplined about it. the main thing i wish someone told me earlier is that there's a huge difference between recognizing letters in practice and actually copying a real signal with QRM and fading and someone who doesnt space things out nicely. so like even when you feel ready, the real thing still feels hard at first and thats normal i think.