so i've been wanting to learn CW for a while now and i finally decided to just do it but i honestly have no idea where to start. i downloaded a couple apps and tried some stuff on youtube but nothing really seems to stick. like i can hear the letters and kind of recognize maybe 5 or 6 of them after a few days but then i sit down the next day and its like i forgot half of them again.

is there like a specific method people use that actually works or do you just have to grind through it until it clicks? i heard something about the Koch method but i dont really understand how thats different from just learning all the letters at once. also does the speed you practice at matter early on because some of the apps let you slow it down really far and i wasnt sure if that was helping or hurting me. any advice appreciated, been a ham for about 2 years but never touched CW until now

yeah the Koch method is worth understanding before you go any further. basically the idea is you learn at a higher character speed from the start, like 15-20 wpm for the actual dit-dah timing, but you put a longer gap between characters so you have time to think. the goal is your brain learns to hear each letter as a sound, not count dits and dahs. if you slow everything down too much you end up counting and then you hit a wall around 10 wpm that's really hard to break through later.

LCWO dot net is free and a lot of people swear by it, it uses the Koch approach and you can set your character speed vs your overall speed separately. i'd say start there honestly. the forgetting thing is totally normal by the way, your brain needs a lot of repetition before it starts to feel automatic. i think it took me maybe 3 or 4 weeks before i stopped feeling like i was guessing on every letter. just dont try to cram too much in one session, 15-20 minutes a day is way better than an hour on the weekend

im in basically the same boat as you, been at it for about six weeks now. what helped me was using the Morse Mania app on my phone during random downtime, like waiting in line or whatever. the thing is i also started listening to really slow QSOs on the air even before i could copy much and just trying to pull out callsigns. theres a website called morse.ninja that has code practice that you can download as mp3s too, i think its similar to the old arrl code practice recordings. honestly some days feel like youre going backwards but then suddenly something clicks and you can copy a whole word without thinking about it, its a weird process