so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and keep seeing people talk about cw on the bands and honestly it sounds kind of cool, like theres something about it that seems almost meditative or whatever. anyway i dont really know where to start. i tried just looking up youtube videos but theres so many different approaches and some people say learn the sounds not the dots and dashes and others say use an app and i dont know which way is actually going to stick for someone who has zero background with this.

i work a desk job so i could probably practice during lunch or something. is there like a standard way people do this now or is it just whatever works for you

the thing everyone will tell you and its true — do NOT learn the dits and dahs as written patterns. like dont memorize that K is dash dot dash as a visual thing. you want to hear K and just know it, the way you hear a word in english and dont spell it out in your head first. the Koch method is what most people end up recommending and theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does it online, you just work through letters two at a time starting with K and M i think. the whole idea is you learn each character at full speed from the beginning so your brain has to recognize the sound pattern, not count anything.

honestly the biggest thing is just doing it every single day even if its ten minutes. i went months doing it inconsistently and made almost no progress, then started doing it every morning before coffee and it started clicking within a few weeks. lunch break would be perfect for you.

just gonna throw in that i used the morse toad app on my phone for like the first month and it actually helped a lot for just getting the letters down. not saying its the best method or anything but if youre doing lunch breaks and dont want to be at a computer it works. i also watched some of W7ATC's videos on youtube which kind of explained the rhythm thing better than any app did for me. im still pretty slow, like maybe 8-10 wpm on a good day, but i can actually copy real signals now which felt impossible six months ago so theres that