so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how they wish they'd learned it earlier and whatever, and i kind of want to give it a shot but i genuinely have no idea where to start. like do you just listen to recordings over and over? buy some program? i downloaded one app but it felt really random and i wasnt sure if i was doing it right or just wasting my time

also does it matter what speed you start at, i heard something about starting slow being bad? or maybe it was starting too fast being bad, i cant remember which. someone at my club mentioned the Koch method but didnt explain what that actually means. just looking for what actually worked for people i guess, not really interested in buying a whole course if i can avoid it

the thing about starting slow being bad is real — if you learn letters at like 5 wpm you end up counting dits and dahs in your head instead of just hearing the letter as a sound, and thats a really hard habit to break later. the Koch method is basically learning one character at a time but at a speed that feels almost too fast, like 15-20 wpm, so your brain has to just recognize it as a whole sound rather than picking it apart. you start with just two characters, get like 90% accuracy on those, then add another one. theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does Koch training in your browser, i used it for maybe 20 minutes a day for about 4 months and went from nothing to being able to copy simple QSOs. consistency is way more important than long sessions, seriously even 10 minutes a day beats an hour on weekends

also just listening to actual on-air CW helps more than people think even before you can copy much. tune around 7.050 or so in the evening and just let it wash over you, your brain starts picking stuff out eventually

im in basically the same boat as you honestly so take this for what its worth but i've been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone during my commute and its actually been pretty decent for just drilling letters. not sure its the most scientific approach but i can copy my callsign now without thinking about it so something is sticking lol. someone in another thread mentioned just sending random stuff with a straight key even before you can copy well, like just to get the muscle memory going, havent tried that yet but it sounds like it might help