so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and keep seeing people talk about cw and honestly it sounds kind of cool but also completely impossible to learn at this point in my life. im not young anymore lol and i feel like its one of those things where either you grew up with it or you just cant do it. but maybe im wrong?

i guess my question is more like... how do you go from knowing nothing to actually being able to use it on the air. i downloaded one of those morse apps a while back and just stared at it not knowing what to do. is there like a method people actually recommend or is it just grind it until it clicks

honestly the best thing i ever did was forget about learning the dots and dashes visually. like dont even think about it as dit dah patterns written down, that just slows you down later when youre trying to copy at speed. look up the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net where you basically start with just two characters and you only add a new one when you hit a certain accuracy threshold. feels slow at first but it actually works and you end up hearing the letters as sounds instead of counting beats

the other thing people always say and its true is learn at a higher character speed than your overall speed. so like send characters fast but with long gaps between them. farnsworth spacing i think its called. if you learn at 5wpm with slow characters youll have to relearn everything when you try to go faster. i made that mistake. took me way longer than it needed to

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe three months now. i use an app called morse mania on my phone and just do like 10-15 minutes a day whenever i have a few minutes. its not fast progress but i can copy maybe 8 or 9 letters now without thinking too hard. my elmer told me the main thing is just consistency, even short sessions every day beat doing an hour once a week apparently. havent tried any actual qsos yet but thats the goal eventually