so ive been a tech for about a year and just upgraded to general last month, and everybody keeps telling me i should learn cw even though its not required anymore. i get it, i get why people like it, but i have absolutely no idea where to even begin. like do i learn the alphabet first as a whole thing or just start with a few letters? i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem to do it different ways and now im more confused than when i started. one of them just throws random letters at you and another one does the whole koch method thing which i read about but i dont fully understand how that works either. i guess my main question is just... is there one way that actually works better than the others or does it just depend on the person. also how long did it take you to get to a point where you could actually have a real qso on the air, not just copying practice sessions

the Koch method is honestly the way to go in my opinion, stick with it even if it feels slow at first. the idea is you learn two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever, and you only move on when you can copy them reliably, then you add one more at a time. the reason this works better than slowing everything down is your brain starts recognizing the sounds as whole patterns instead of counting dits and dahs which is a trap a lot of beginners fall into. once you start counting you have to unlearn it later and that's a pain.

for resources i really like lcwo.net, its free and the interface is a bit clunky but it does Koch properly and tracks your progress. also just listening to actual cw on the air even when you cant copy it yet helps more than you'd think, just getting used to the rhythm of real qsos. as for how long, honestly it varies a lot but if you put in like 15 or 20 minutes a day consistently most people can do a slow ragchew qso within a few months. dont try to cram it all in one weekend, short daily sessions beat long occasional ones every time

i was in the exact same spot maybe two years ago and what finally clicked for me was just picking one app and sticking with it instead of bouncing around. i used morse toad for a while and then switched to the ham morse app, both are fine but switching constantly just resets your brain i think. the other thing that helped me weirdly was just tapping along to stuff while watching tv, like just tapping out letters of words i saw on screen. feels dumb but it builds the muscle memory. im still not fast by any means, maybe 10wpm on a good day copying, but i had my first actual on-air cw contact about four months in so it does happen