so ive been wanting to learn CW for a while now, like probably a year of just thinking about it and never starting. finally sat down last week and tried a few things and honestly im more confused than before about the best way to go about it. i downloaded like three different apps, tried just memorizing the dit-dah patterns from a chart, watched some youtube stuff, and nothing really clicked. feels like theres too many methods and everyone swears by their own thing.

my goal isnt even to get super fast, maybe just enough to make a few contacts someday and not completely embarass myself. do most people start with the alphabet first or just jump into words? also is koch method actually worth sticking with or is that just something old timers push because its what they learned on? any advice appreciated, im starting totally from scratch here

the overwhelm is real and i went through the exact same thing about two years ago. what finally got it to stick for me was just committing to one method and ignoring everything else for at least a month, which is harder than it sounds when you keep reading about some other approach that sounds better.

i used the LCWO website with Koch method and honestly just doing it 10-15 minutes every single day was more valuable than longer sessions a few times a week. the brain needs repetition spread out over time to actually wire those sounds in. the big thing people mess up early on is learning the dits and dahs as a visual pattern instead of just a sound — like dont ever look at a chart while youre training, just let the audio hit you and try to respond. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually call CQ and copy a basic exchange, wasnt pretty but it worked

also just forget about speed for now completely. seriously. even 5wpm is fine to start, you can always bump it up later and it goes faster than you think once the letters are locked in

im pretty much in the same boat as you actually so take this with a grain of salt but i found the morse toad app kind of decent for drilling individual letters. the koch thing confuses me too ngl, like why start with K and R specifically, seemed arbitrary. but ive heard enough people say it works that im trying to trust the process i guess