so ive been wanting to learn CW for a while now, got my general last year and keep hearing people talk about how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and all that. but every time i sit down to actually try and learn it i just feel completely lost about where to even begin. like do i start memorizing the letters first or just dive into listening to actual transmissions or what

i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem to teach it differently and i honestly dont know which approach is right. someone at the club mentioned the Koch method but i have no idea if thats the best way or just one way. been messing around with it for maybe two weeks and feel like im not making any progress at all. any advice would be helpful, even just knowing what worked for you personally would be great

the Koch method is honestly the way to go in my opinion, stick with it and dont give up after two weeks because that is way too early to judge your progress. the whole idea is you learn two characters at full speed first, like 20wpm or whatever, and only add a new one when you can copy the existing ones at something like 90% accuracy. the temptation is to slow everything way down but that just teaches your brain to hear individual dits and dahs instead of the sound of the whole character as a unit, which will mess you up later when you try to go faster.

LCWO.net is what i used and its free and works really well for the Koch progression. just do like 15 minutes a day consistently rather than an hour on weekends, the consistency matters way more than the total time. also once you know maybe 10 or 15 characters start listening to actual slow CW on the air, W1AW does code practice transmissions at different speeds and theres also a bunch of podcasts and youtube stuff. your brain needs to hear it in context not just random character drills forever

i started maybe 8 months ago and im still not great but i can copy around 15wpm now on a good day so take that for what its worth. what helped me personally was just listening to morse in the background while doing other stuff, like not actively trying to copy it but just having it on. seemed weird but after a while the letters started sounding familiar. also the Morse Mania app was pretty good for just a few minutes here and there on my phone when i had downtime.

the frustrating part for me was the numbers and punctuation, kept mixing up stuff like 6 and b for way longer than i want to admit lol. anyway dont stress too much about feeling overwhelmed at the start i think everyoen goes through that