so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and i keep reading about how cw is this whole other level of operating and i kind of want to try it but i have no idea where to begin. like do i just start memorizing letters one at a time? i downloaded a couple apps but they all seem different and i dont know which approach is actually worth the time. someone mentioned something called the koch method to me at a club meeting but the guy kind of wandered off before explaining what it actually is. is there like a standard way people learn this or is it just whatever works for you. also i have no idea what speed i should be practicing at, ive heard both really slow and then something about how you should learn at full speed from the start which sounds insane to me but what do i know

the Koch method is basically where you learn at a speed that forces you to hear the rhythm rather than count dits and dahs, usually something like 15 to 20 wpm character speed even if the overall text is slow, which is called Farnsworth spacing. the idea is you dont want your brain to get used to slow sloppy characters because then you have to relearn them later when you want to speed up. LCWO.net is probably the most popular free site for this and it walks you through the Koch sequence automatically, you just set your character speed higher than your word speed and work through the letters one or two at a time until you hit like 90% accuracy before adding the next one.

honestly the biggest thing people dont tell you is just be consistent, even 10 minutes a day every day beats an hour session once a week. it took me probably 4 months of daily practice to get comfortable copying at 10 wpm in real QSOs but everyone is different. just dont try to do it by counting the dots and dashes, you'll plateau really fast that way.

yeah im in kind of the same boat as you, started about 3 weeks ago using the morse code ninja stuff on youtube which i actually really like because he has these word lists organized by frequency so youre hearing common words over and over. i still feel pretty lost most of the time but i can copy maybe half the alphabet reliably now so thats something i guess. the app i use is called morse mania, its free and pretty decent for drilling individual characters. what i found is mixing up a few different resources helps because you dont get bored as fast