so ive been thinking about learning CW for a while now and i finally decided to actually try it. bought my tech license last year and now im working toward general but honestly the thing that keeps pulling me back is wanting to do CW properly someday. the problem is i have no idea where to start and theres like a million different opinions online about how to do it.

some people say do the koch method, some say just listen to a bunch of QSOs until it clicks, some say use apps. i downloaded one app and it just felt like i was memorizing dots and dashes which i read is the wrong way to do it? i dont know. is there like a generally accepted best starting point or is it really just whatever works for you. also how long did it actually take you to feel even a little confident with it

yeah dont memorize the patterns as dots and dashes, thats the thing everyone says and its true. youll hit a wall around 8-10 wpm and never get past it because your brain is counting instead of hearing. the whole idea is to hear each letter as a sound, like how you recognize a word in english without spelling it out in your head.

koch method is probably the most structured way to go and LC (learn CW online) at lcwo.net is free and does it pretty well. you start with just two characters, get comfortable recognizing them at a fast character speed even if the words come slow, then add one character at a time. takes a while before you have the full alphabet but when it clicks it really does click differently than the dots-and-dashes approach. i think i was maybe three or four months in before i felt like i could copy something on air, badly, but still. just set aside like 15 minutes a day and be consistent, thats honestly more important than any specific method

im in kind of the same boat as you actually so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using the morse toad app and also just playing random CW from youtube videos of actual QSOs in the background while im doing other stuff. not sure if the passive listening thing is doing anything yet lol but the app at least made the letters feel more familiar. been at it about 6 weeks