so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (technician, working toward general eventually) and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatnot. i got curious enough that i want to actually try learning it but i genuinely have no idea where to begin. like do people still use those paper charts with the dots and dashes or is there an app or something. i tried googling it but there's so much conflicting stuff out there, some people say learn it one way some say that way is wrong. a guy at my club mentioned something called koch method? is that the thing everyone uses now or is there something better. i dont really have a goal like passing a test or anything, code isnt required anymore obviously, i just want to be able to actually use it on the air someday. any advice from people who actually went through this would be helpful

yeah the Koch method is pretty much what most people recommend these days and honestly for good reason. the basic idea is you start learning just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably, then you add one more character at a time. the whole point is your brain learns the sound of each letter as a single thing instead of counting dits and dahs which will absolutely kill you later if you try to go fast. LCWO dot net is the website a lot of people use, its free and does the Koch progression for you. theres also the Morse Trainer app if you want something on your phone.

the other thing id say is dont skip the sending practice. a lot of people only do receiving and then wonder why they freeze up when they try to actually make a contact. get a cheap practice oscillator or even just a straight key hooked to nothing and send along with whatever youre copying. takes a while but it clicks eventually, just takes longer than most people expect so dont get discouraged after a week or two

im in kind of the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months now. i use the jscwlib trainer and also just listen to slow speed qso's on 40 meters late at night which helps me hear what real cw actually sounds like vs the perfectly clean practice stuff. slow speed nets exist too, W1AW does code practice transmissions on a schedule you can find on the arrl site i think. honestly the hardest part for me has been just staying consistent, like doing a little bit every day is way more effective than doing a big session once a week, at least thats what everyone keeps telling me and from experience its true even if its annoying to hear lol