so ive been thinking about finally trying to learn CW for a while now. i got my general last year and keep hearing people talk about how great it is for weak signal stuff and honestly it just seems cool. but i have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize all the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way to do it

i tried printing out one of those charts and staring at it for a few days but nothing is sticking. feels like im trying to learn a new alphabet but slower. someone at my local club mentioned something called the Koch method but i dont really understand what that means or if its better than just... learning it the normal way i guess. are there any apps or websites that actually work or is it one of those things where you just have to grind it out for months

yeah so the Koch method is basically where you start with just two characters at full speed — like 20wpm — instead of learning them slow and then speeding up later. the idea is your brain learns the sound as a whole instead of you counting dits and dahs. Farnsworth spacing is the other piece of that, where the characters themselves are fast but the gaps between them are longer so you have time to think. most people who tried to learn the old way by counting and then had to relearn it say going the Koch route first would have saved them a ton of headache.

for actually doing it, LCWO dot net is what a lot of people use, its free and you can set it up to follow the Koch sequence. there's also an app called Morse Trainer that works pretty well on the phone for doing short sessions when you're waiting around somewhere. the big thing is just doing a little bit every single day rather than sitting down for two hours once a week, consistency is way more important than total time in my experience. took me about four months of maybe 15 minutes a day before i could copy simple QSOs, not saying that's typical just what it was for me

dont bother with the chart thing, seriously, that was my first mistake too. you end up just counting which slows everything down and then you have to basically unlearn it later which is annoying. i use an app called Morse-It and just do a few minutes here and there, like on my lunch break or whatever. im still not great honestly, maybe 10wpm on a good day copying, but its way more than i could do six months ago so something is working i guess

oh also there are some youtube videos where guys just send code at various speeds and you can try to copy along, some of them are specifically for beginners. i forget the channel names but if you search something like 'CW practice slow morse' you'll find a few. one thing nobody told me is that sending is actually kind of easier to start with than receiving, so getting a straight key and just playing around with sending letters helps your brain connect the sound to the letter faster for some reason. at least it did for me