so i've been a tech for about a year and just upgraded to general last month, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever. i got curious and started looking into it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper? i tried that and it feels completely wrong, like im just memorizing a chart and not actually learning to hear it. is there some specific way people do this that actually works or is it just grind until it clicks? i feel like im missing something obvious

yeah don't do the chart thing, that's the old way and it'll slow you down a lot. what you want is to learn by sound from day one, never look at dots and dashes on paper if you can help it. the Koch method is what most people swear by now, you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm and you only add a new one when you can copy the first ones at like 90% accuracy. LCWO.net is free and does this for you automatically, i spent maybe 20 minutes a day on it for a few months and went from nothing to being able to ragchew on the air. the key thing everyone says and everyone ignores is keep the character speed high even if you slow down the word spacing. if you learn characters at 5wpm you'll just have to relearn them later when you try to go faster

i basically just used the Morse Mania app on my phone whenever i had a few minutes, like waiting in line or whatever. took me a while and im still not great honestly but i can copy maybe 10-12wpm on a good day. also listen to actual qsos on the air even before you can copy everything, just tune around 40m around 7.050 or so and let it wash over you. something about hearing real signals instead of a computer voice makes it feel more real i think. also the W1AW code practice transmissions are still a thing and they publish the text ahead of time so you can follow along