so ive been a tech for about a year and finally upgraded to general last month, been thinking about trying cw but honestly have no idea where to even begin. i downloaded a couple apps and tried doing the alphabet thing where you learn each letter one by one but it feels like im just memorizing patterns and not actually hearing the code if that makes sense. like i can do dit dah in my head but when i hear it played back i cant recognize anything in real time. is that normal or am i doing something wrong? someone at the club mentioned the koch method but i dont really understand what that means in practice. do people still use morsecode trainer or is there something better now. just feel like im spinning my wheels

yeah what you're describing is completely normal, almost everyone hits that wall where they know the dits and dahs on paper but real audio just sounds like noise. the big thing people get wrong starting out is learning the rhythm as a kind of mental translation step instead of just reacting to the sound directly. Koch method basically means you start with only two characters, learn them at full speed like 20wpm even if youre a beginner, get really comfortable until you can copy them without thinking, then add one more character. the key is the character speed stays fast even when the overall word spacing is slow. that way your brain never builds the habit of counting dits and dahs, it just learns the sound as a whole shape.

for resources honestly lcwo.net is what most people use for koch training, its free and you can track your progress character by character. some guys swear by the just learn morse code app too. the other thing id say is get on the air as soon as you have maybe 10 or 15 characters down, even just listening to qrs nets or the cw portion of 40m late at night. hearing real operators is different from any app and it helps a lot faster than you'd think.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months. what helped me was just putting it on in the background while i was doing other stuff around the house, not trying to copy everything just letting it wash over me. sounds dumb but i feel like my ear started picking out letters on its own after a while. also the g4fon trainer on pc has a lot of options if youre on windows, thats what my elmers group recommended to me