so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and i keep hearing people talk about how great CW is and how i should really learn it even though its not required anymore. i messed around with some youtube videos but i honestly cant tell one dit from a dah half the time when theyre strung together into actual letters. like i can hear a single letter maybe but when someone is actually sending a word i just lose it completely.

is there like a method that actually works for beginners or is this just one of those things where you have to suffer through it for months before anything clicks? i saw something about the koch method and something else called farnsworth but i dont really understand the difference or which one i should be using. also what do people actually practice with, just online stuff or do you need some kind of special equipment to start

Koch method is the way to go in my opinion, been recommending it for years. the basic idea is you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy them at 90% accuracy or whatever threshold you set. the trap most people fall into is learning at slow speed and then having to relearn everything faster later because your brain memorized the rhythm wrong. Farnsworth is kind of a middle ground where the characters themselves are sent fast but there's extra space between them, some people like it but Koch purists will argue with you about that all day.

for actually practicing, LCWO dot net is what i started with and its free and it does the Koch method properly. just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently and dont skip days, that part matters more than how long your sessions are. also dont try to write down every letter at first, just let it wash over you for a bit. the recognition has to become automatic or you'll always be behind.

honestly i was in the exact same spot like a year ago and what finally helped me was just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i couldnt understand any of it. there's something about hearing real operators sending real exchanges that your brain starts to pick up patterns from even if you dont know what you're hearing yet. i used 40 meters late at night, tons of CW activity down around 7.050 or so.

the app i used was called Morse Mania, pretty basic but it worked for me for the first few months. im not super fast still, maybe 12wpm on a good day copying, but i made my first CW contact last spring and it was kind of a big deal after thinking id never get there