so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how great it is and i decided i want to actually learn it properly. problem is i have no idea where to start. like do i learn the alphabet first and then practice sending or do i just listen to a bunch of stuff until it clicks or what. i downloaded some app but it just throws letters at me randomly and i dont know if thats the right approach or if im wasting my time. also how fast should i be trying to go when im just starting out, someone told me 5 wpm but someone else said that actually makes it harder to learn because you hear the rhythm wrong or something. its kind of overwhelming honestly

the thing about 5 wpm is actually real, you dont want to learn at that speed because your brain starts counting dits and dahs instead of hearing the whole character as a sound. look up the Koch method, thats what most people swear by these days. basically you start with just two characters at like 20 wpm character speed but with extra space between them so you have time to think, then you add more characters one at a time as you get them down. LCWO dot net is the site most people use for this, its free and you can set it up exactly that way. took me probably 3 months of like 15 minutes a day before i could actually copy a slow QSO but it does work. the key is consistent practice, even just a little bit every day beats doing an hour once a week by a lot.

im in basically the same boat as you, been working on it for maybe 6 weeks now. i use the morse code ninja videos on youtube which are pretty good for just getting the sounds in your head, he does these word lists at different speeds and it helps more than random characters did for me. still pretty bad at it lol but i can get maybe half the letters consistently now so thats something i guess. one thing i noticed is if im tired it feels pointless, like my brain just refuses to process it so i try to do it in the morning now