so ive been a tech for about a year and finally upgraded to general last month and everyone keeps telling me i should learn CW even though its not required anymore. i tried a few times but i just cant figure out where to start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper first or is that the wrong approach? i downloaded some app but it just threw random letters at me and i gave up after like 20 minutes because nothing was sticking.

also is there a certain speed you should learn at, i heard something about the koch method but i dont really understand how that works. any advice would be helpful i just feel like im going around in circles every time i try to get started

yeah the dots and dashes chart thing is basically the worst way to do it, almost everyone who goes that route ends up having to unlearn it later because you start counting instead of just hearing the character as a sound. the whole idea with koch is you pick a speed that sounds fast enough that you literally cannot count — like 20wpm character speed — and you just learn two characters at a time until you can copy them at like 90% accuracy before adding the next one. it sounds counterintuitive but it works because your brain starts associating the sound with the letter directly instead of translating through dots and dashes first.

for actually doing it, LCWO dot net is free and has the koch trainer built in, a lot of people swear by it. just set it to 20/10 or so (character speed / effective speed) and dont rush through adding new characters, seriously that part trips everyone up. some people also like the app Morse Toad or just listening to slow QSO recordings on youtube to get a feel for real-world rhythm. the main thing is doing a little bit every single day rather than one long session on the weekend, like even 10-15 minutes daily will get you further than an hour on saturdays

im in basically the same boat as you lol, been trying to learn for like 3 months now. what actually helped me click a bit was finding those learn CW online videos where someone reads a callsign or a word and shows you the waveform at the same time. something about seeing it visually while hearing it made it make more sense to me. still super slow though, maybe 5wpm on a good day. the LCWO site the other person mentioned is pretty good i think its just really repetative which i guess is the point