so ive been licensed for about 8 months now mostly doing fm stuff on my local repeater and some wspr which honestly kind of runs itself. but ive always wanted to learn cw and just never really committed to it. i tried downloading one of those apps a while back and just got frustrated and gave up after like two weeks.

my question is i guess, is there a right way to go about this or do people just kind of figure it out on their own? i hear some people say to learn the characters by sound and not by counting dots and dashes, and other people say to do the koch method, and then theres the lcwo website which i tried but honestly couldnt tell if i was doing it right. im not even sure what a realistic goal looks like. like is 5 wpm something you can actually use on the air or do i need to be at like 15+ before anyone will respond to me

any advice appreciated, been sitting on this for months and want to actually try again

yeah the counting dots and dashes thing will absolutely kill you, dont do that. your brain just cant keep up past like 3-4 wpm if youre mentally going dit-dah-dit every time. the whole point is you want to hear the letter as a sound, like hearing a word in a foreign language without translating it in your head first.

lcwo is legit, the koch method on there is what i used and it does work but you have to trust the process even when it feels like nothing is clicking. the frustrating part is it really does feel like youre going nowhere for weeks and then something kind of snaps into place. i set it to like 20wpm character speed with a slower effective speed, thats the farnsworth method, so the characters sound right but theres more space between them to think. that way when you speed up later your ear is already trained to the fast sounds.

5 wpm is enough to actually make a contact, people are out there doing qrs stuff and theyll slow down for you. 40 meters around 7.050 or so tends to have slower activity. dont wait until youre perfect to get on air, honestly making actual contacts is what made it stick for me more than any app.

im kind of in the same boat as you tbh, been dabbling with morse for maybe three months now. what helped me more than anything was just doing like 10-15 minutes every single day instead of trying to grind for an hour on weekends. consistency thing i guess. also theres a podcast called the CW podcast or something like that where they just send code at different speeds and you can listen while doing other stuff, i put it on during my commute sometimes

still not confident enough to call cq but getting there i think