so ive been licensed for about a year now, general class, mostly doing stuff on ft8 and occasionally some ssb but everyone keeps telling me i should learn cw and honestly im kind of curious about it. the problem is i have no idea where to start. like i tried looking stuff up and theres like a million different methods and apps and some people say learn by sound not by memorizing dots and dashes and others say use the koch method and i dont even know what half of this means

is there like a standard way people do this or does it just depend on the person. also how long does it realistically take before you can actually have a qso with someone, not just copy slow practice transmissions. im not in a huge rush just want to know what im getting into before i commit to practicing every day

honest answer is it varies a lot but the advice about learning by sound is solid, dont make the mistake of memorizing dit dah patterns because then youre translating in your head instead of just hearing the letter and thats a real pain to unlearn later. i did that when i first started and had to basically restart

koch method worked well for me personally, theres a free program called lcwo.net that implements it and you can just work through it at your own pace. the idea is you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20 wpm, and only add more letters once you can copy those reliably. sounds weird to start fast but it trains your ear properly from the beginning. i was making actual contacts probably around the 8 month mark but i was only practicing maybe 15 minutes a day so mileage varies. there's also the chirpster app and jscwlib stuff if you want something on your phone. just be consistent, that matters way more than how long each session is

yeah what he said about lcwo is good but also just listen to a lot of actual on-air cw even before you can copy it, like tune around 40m in the evenings and just let it wash over you. sounds weird but it helps your brain get used to the rhythm of real operators which is different from perfectly timed computer generated stuff. also morse code ninja on youtube has some really good practice videos organized by word frequency which i found way more useful than random letter drills once i got past the basics