so i've been a tech for about 8 months now and i've been thinking about getting into CW for a while. i know its not required anymore for anything but theres something about it that just appeals to me, maybe nostalgia i guess even though i wasnt around when it was required lol. anyway i downloaded a couple apps and tried watching some youtube videos but i feel like im not making any progress. like i can recognize maybe 5 or 6 letters pretty reliably but then i get completely lost when they start coming faster or stringing letters together into words. is there like a method that actually works or am i just doing it wrong somehow. i dont really know what speed i should be practicing at either, some people say go slow and some say go fast from the beginning and i dont know who to believe

ok so the slow vs fast thing you mentioned is the Koch method vs the traditional way and honestly most people who actually learned it in the last 20 years or so swear by Koch. the idea is you learn each character at the actual speed you want to operate at eventually, like 20wpm or whatever, but you just do short sessions and add letters as you get them right. what you dont want is to learn the rhythm of letters slowly and then have to relearn them faster later, that'll drive you nuts.

LCWO dot net is free and its basically built around Koch, i used it a couple years ago and got to about 15wpm before i started getting on the air. the other thing is dont try to think about the dots and dashes, just train your brain to hear the sound as the letter. when you hear dit dah just think A, not oh thats a dot and a dash. sounds obvious but a lot of beginners try to count dits and dahs and it slows everything down.

also just be patient with yourself, took me probably 4 months of daily practice before i felt comfortable enough to even try a QSO and i was still pretty rough at first

im in kind of the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 6 weeks. the app i've been using is called Morse Mania and its pretty decent for drilling individual characters but yeah once real code starts going it sounds like a blur to me too. someone on another thread here mentioned just listening to CW on the bands even when you cant copy it, just to get used to how it sounds in a real environment rather than a clean app. havent tried that yet but it makes sense i think