so ive been studying for my general and everyone keeps telling me i should learn CW even though its not required anymore. i get that its useful and some people are really into it but i honestly have no idea where to even start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there software or what

i tried looking it up and theres a bunch of different apps and websites and some people say learn it one way and others say dont do it that way, so im kind of confused which direction to go. someone at my club mentioned the Koch method but i dont really know what that is either. any advice from people who actually went through this would be helpful, im not in a rush just want to do it the right way i guess

okay so the big thing everyone who actually stuck with it will tell you is dont learn the dots and dashes as visual patterns, like dont make a chart and stare at it. your brain ends up counting and you'll never get fast enough to actually use it. what you want is to hear the letters as sounds, like the whole letter as one thing not dit-dit-dah or whatever.

the Koch method is basically starting with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever your target is, and you only add a new character when you can copy the current ones at like 90% accuracy. LCWO.net is free and does exactly this, thats where most people start these days. there's also the Morse Toad app which some people swear by. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently, that matters more than doing an hour once a week. it took me probably 4 or 5 months before i felt comfortable enough to actually try calling CQ and even then my copying was pretty rough for a while

just gonna say i tried learning twice before it actually clicked for me. first time i did the chart thing and got nowhere. second time i used LCWO and got further but gave up around the 15 character mark because i plateaued and got frustrated. third time i combined LCWO with actually listening to slow CW on the air with a decoder running alongside so i could see what was being sent while i listened. that last part helped me a lot, something about hearing real QSOs instead of random practice text made it feel worth doing. also just listen to it in the background sometimes even if youre not actively trying to copy, your brain does something with it