so ive been a tech for about two years now and i keep thinking about upgrading to general or extra at some point but honestly the thing thats been on my mind more is just learning cw. i know its not required anymore for any license but theres something about it that just appeals to me, like i want to actually be able to use it on the air someday

the problem is i have no idea where to start. i downloaded a couple apps and one of them just shows you the dots and dashes visually which i heard is the wrong way to learn? someone at the club mentioned the koch method but i dont really understand what that is or if theres a specific program i should use. also i have no idea what speed i should be aiming for or how long this realistically takes if you practice like 15-20 minutes a day. any advice welcome, im coming in completely from zero

yeah the visual dots and dashes thing is generally considered bad practice for actually learning to copy by ear, you end up counting dits and dahs in your head instead of just hearing the character as a sound which slows you way down later. the koch method basically just means you start with two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever you're aiming for, and you only add a new character once you can copy the current set with something like 90% accuracy. the idea is your brain learns to recognize the rhythm of each letter rather than trying to decode it consciously

for software a lot of people swear by lcwo.net which is free and lets you do koch training right in the browser, and there's also the Just Learn Morse Code program that's been around forever. i used a combination of both when i was learning. the other thing i'd say is don't drop your practice speed to something like 5wpm thinking it'll be easier, it won't, because slow code sounds completely different from fast code and you'll just have to relearn it anyway. 15-20 minutes a day consistently is honestly plenty, the key word being consistently

im in basically the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using the Morse Mania app for a few weeks and it seems decent, also there's a hamradio youtube channel i forget the name that does like call sign practice at different speeds which i thought was pretty useful once you know the alphabet. the thing i keep struggling with is numbers and punctuation, they always trip me up