so ive been thinking about learning CW for a while now and i finally decided to actually do it but i honestly dont even know where to start. i downloaded a couple apps and tried just listening to random QSOs on 40m but it sounds like complete gibberish to me. like i can pick out maybe one or two letters sometimes but then its gone and i lose the thread completely.

is there a method people actually recommend or do you just kind of grind it out until it clicks? i heard about the Koch method from someone at the club meeting but they didnt really explain it beyond like oh just look it up. also does it matter what speed i start at because some stuff ive seen says start slow and some says start fast and i genuinely dont know which advice to follow

yeah the Koch method is probably what most people suggest these days and for good reason. the basic idea is you start with just two characters at a comfortable but not too slow speed — like 15 or 20 wpm sending speed — but with a lot of extra space between characters so your brain has time to process. you never actually go below like 12-15 wpm on the character speed itself, that's the key thing people miss when they say start slow. starting too slow just teaches your brain to count dits and dahs instead of hearing the sound as a whole character, and then you have to unlearn all that later which is a pain.

LCWO dot net is the site a lot of people use, its free and it implements Koch pretty well. just do 10-15 minutes a day consistently, thats honestly more useful than an hour every couple weeks. it takes a while before it suddenly starts feeling natural but there is a point where it just kind of clicks and you stop consciously decoding and start just hearing words. hang in there with it

i was in the exact same spot about a year ago and honestly lcwo was what worked for me too. but i also want to say dont feel bad about how long it takes because i spent like three months before i could copy anything on the air reliably and i still drop stuff when condx get rough or the op is sending a little sloppy. the thing that helped me a lot besides just the drilling was actually listening to stuff like W1AW code practice because the content is like real QSO text and news items so your brain starts to anticipate common words and phrases which helps a ton. just be patient with yourself its not a fast process for most people