so ive been a tech for about a year and recently upgraded to general and somewhere along the way i got kind of obsessed with the idea of learning CW. i know its not required anymore but theres something about it that just seems cool i guess. problem is i have no idea where to even start. ive downloaded a couple apps but i just end up tapping randomly and feeling like an idiot after 10 minutes.

is there like a structured way people do this? i tried looking up the koch method and read a little about it but i honestly dont fully understand how it works in practice. do you just start with two letters and keep going or what. also is it better to learn the sounds or to memorize the dots and dashes visually because ive seen people argue both ways and i cant tell whats actually better for someone just starting out.

any apps or websites people actually use and like would be great too, not just the ones that always show up first in google

the dots and dashes thing — yeah dont do that. seriously just dont. your brain will end up counting and once you start counting youll never get fast enough to actually have a QSO. you want to hear each character as a sound, like how a word sounds to you, not something you decode piece by piece. took me a long time to unlearn the counting habit when i first started and it was a real pain.

for the koch method, yeah basically you start with two characters — traditionally K and M because theyre pretty distinct sounding — and you drill them at whatever speed you want to eventually operate at, like 15 or 20 wpm, but with long spaces between characters so you have time to think. the idea is your brain learns the sound at real speed from day one instead of at some crawling pace you later have to speed up from. LCWO dot net is probably the best free thing out there for this, its a little clunky looking but it works well. also the app Morse Mania is decent for mobile if you want something on your phone.

just do like 15 minutes a day consistently, more than that and your brain kind of saturates. people underestimate how much the consistency matters vs grinding for an hour once a week

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months now. what helped me a lot was just listening to W1AW code practice recordings, they put them out on a schedule and you can also download them from the arrl site. theres something about hearing actual on-air style content vs an app that made it click more for me, maybe because it feels more real idk.

i still struggle a lot with numbers and punctuation honestly but letters are getting better. one thing nobody told me is that it gets kind of frustrating around the 2-3 week mark where you feel like youre not improving and thats apparently totally normal