so i got my technician a while back and been thinking about eventually going for general and then extra but honestly the thing that keeps pulling me back is morse code, i know its not required anymore but i keep reading about how much people enjoy it and how it opens up more of the bands and i kind of want to learn it for real

problem is i have no idea where to start. i downloaded like three different apps and none of them feel right, one of them just shows me the dots and dashes on screen which i heard is the wrong way to do it? my brother said to just memorize the chart but that sounds like a disaster. is there a method that actually works or is it just one of those things where you grind through it and eventually it clicks

also does anyone know roughly how long it takes to get to like 5 wpm or whatever you need to make an actual contact, im not trying to become some cw contest station just want to be able to have a basic qso someday

yeah dont memorize the chart, that is pretty much the one thing everyone agrees on. what you want is to learn each character by its sound not by counting dots and dashes, theres a difference and it matters a lot once you start trying to copy at any real speed

the method most people swear by is the Koch method, basically you start with just two characters at a fast speed, like 20 wpm, and you only add a new character once you can copy the ones you know at like 90% accuracy. sounds weird to learn at fast speed when youre a beginner but it trains your ear the right way from the start. LCWO dot net is the website i used, its free and its exactly that method. i did maybe 15-20 minutes a day and was making slow QSOs within a few months, not fast ones but enough to feel real

also just listening to actual cw on the air helps even when you cant copy it yet, your brain starts picking up the rhythm without you realizing it

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, been at it for about six weeks now using that LCWO site the elmers always recommend and im on like character 12 or something. its slow going but i can already hear a few letters without thinking about it which is wild

the thing that helped me was also getting the Morse Toad app just to fill in time when im waiting around, its a bit gamey but honestly thats fine for me. i think the 5 wpm thing is way more reachable than it sounds, like a few months of consistent practice and you can get there, the hard part for me is just being consistent and not skipping days because i feel like i forget stuff fast if i take a break