so i've been licensed for about 8 months now (tech) and i keep going back and forth on whether i want to try learning CW. i know its not required anymore but theres something about it that just seems cool and a lot of the guys at my club swear by it for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever else. my question is more like... where do you even start. i downloaded like 3 different apps and they all seem totally different in terms of how they approach it and i cant tell if im doing something completely wrong or if theres just no right way. one of them has you learn letters one at a time which feels slow, another throws like random characters at me right away. i practiced for maybe two weeks and then got frustrated and quit. should i just be more patient or is there a better method im missing

yeah the app thing can be overwhelming honestly. the one that throws random characters at you is probably doing Koch method which is actually considered pretty good -- you start with just two characters at a time, get those down to like 90% accuracy before adding another, and keep going. the key thing a lot of people mess up early on is the speed. you want to learn at a higher character speed, like 20wpm or so, even if the spacing between letters is stretched way out so you have more time to think. this is called Farnsworth timing. if you learn at 5wpm from the start the characters start sounding like you're counting dits and dahs instead of recognizing the sound as a whole, and then when you try to speed up later you basically have to unlearn everything. i did exactly that when i first started and wasted probably a month. lcwo.net is free and does Koch method pretty well, and theres also the Just Learn Morse Code software if you're on windows. honestly just pick one and stick with it for at least a month before deciding its not working

im in basically the same boat as you lol, been trying to learn for like 3 months off and on. what helped me more than the apps was just listening to actual cw on the air even before i could copy anything. like just tune around 7.050 or wherever and let it play in the background. your brain starts picking up patterns without you even trying. also the word THE comes up constantly and once you can hear that without thinking it feels like a big moment for some reason. still cant have a real qso yet but im getting there i think