so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (technician) and i keep hearing people talk about CW and honestly it sounds kind of cool but i have zero idea where to even start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there some better way to do it? i tried looking it up and got overwhelmed fast, theres like apps and youtube videos and people saying you have to learn it by sound not by sight and i dont really understand what that means practically speaking. does anyone have like a simple way to explain how they actually did it? im not trying to upgrade my license or anything just kind of curious if its something a normal person can pick up

ok so the by sound not by sight thing is actually really important and took me a while to get. basically if you learn it by memorizing dots and dashes on a chart, youll always be mentally translating like dash dot dash = K in your head and that slows you way down. the idea is to learn it the same way you learned to read, where you just hear the sound and your brain knows the letter without thinking about it consciously.

i used the Koch method when i started, theres a free program called LCWO.net that walks you through it. starts you with just two characters at a relatively fast speed and drills them until you know them, then adds more. sounds tedious but it works way better than trying to learn all 26 letters at once. i messed around with apps first and wasted probably a month before someone on here pointed me to that site.

honestly just 10-15 minutes a day is enough, more than that and your brain kind of stops absorbing it. took me maybe 3 months to get comfortable enough to actually make a QSO on the air which felt pretty great ngl

yeah what he said about LCWO is solid. i'll add that there's also a phone app called Morse Mania that some people swear by if you want something you can do while waiting in line or whatever. i personally used a combination of that and just listening to slow CW nets on the air even when i couldn't copy everything. just having it in the background helps your ear get used to the rhythm of it i think.

one thing nobody told me when i started -- the hardest part isnt learning the letters its learning to copy in your head without writing every single letter down. thats a whole separate skill. dont stress about it early on just focus on recognizing the characters first