so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, general class, mostly just doing some local 2m stuff but i keep hearing about CW and honestly it sounds kind of cool. problem is i have zero idea where to start. like do i need to learn the alphabet first and then try to copy actual transmissions or is there some specific order you're supposed to go in? i downloaded a couple apps and they all seem to do it differently. one of them teaches you like 5 letters at a time and another one just throws random characters at you from the start. i dont know which approach is better or if it even matters. also i keep reading about something called the koch method but i dont really understand what makes it different. just looking for some direction i guess, not trying to get anywhere fast just want to actually make a CW contact someday

koch method is honestly the way to go, thats what clicked for me after i tried a few other things. basically the idea is you start with just 2 characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever your target is, and you dont move on until you can copy them accurately. then you add one more character at a time. the whole point is your brain learns the sound of each letter as a pattern instead of counting dots and dashes, which is really important because if you learn it slow you end up having to relearn it later when you try to speed up. lcwo.net is free and its set up specifically for this, a lot of people use it. just set it to like 20wpm character speed with maybe 10-12wpm effective speed so there's space between characters at first. stick with it every day even if its just 10 minutes, consistency is way more important than doing a long session once a week

i was in the same spot not that long ago, what ended up working for me was just using the morse code ninja videos on youtube combined with whatever practice i could squeeze in. there's a guy who has recordings of just random 5 letter groups at different speeds and i would just put those on in the car. honestly the hardest part for me wasn't learning the characters it was getting my brain to stop trying to write down every single thing instead of just listening. also if you have any local club near you there might be someone doing elmering on CW, my club has a slow speed net on thursday nights that helped a lot more than i expected