so ive been licensed for about 6 months now (technician) and i keep hearing everyone talk about CW and how great it is and i want to learn it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart? is there software i should be using? i tried just looking at a morse code alphabet chart and it felt completely hopeless like there's no way i'm gonna remember all of that

someone at my local club mentioned the Koch method but i have no idea what that even is. and i've seen people mention something called LCWO which i think is a website? anyway if anyone has gone through this from scratch i'd love to know what actually worked for you because right now i'm kind of spinning my wheels

yeah the chart approach really doesnt work, at least not for most people. the whole thing with morse is you want to hear the letters as sounds not think about dots and dashes at all. if you're decoding dots and dashes in your head you'll always be too slow.

LCWO is definitely the place to start, its free and it uses the Koch method which basically means you start with just two characters and once you can copy those reliably it adds another one. sounds tedious but it actually works because your brain starts recognizing the sound patterns instead of counting. the key thing people get wrong is they set the character speed too slow -- you want to run characters at like 20wpm even if the overall spacing is slower (thats what Farnsworth timing is). if you learn at 5wpm youll have to unlearn all those habits later.

just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently, dont try to cram. took me about 4 months of that before i made my first real CW contact and honestly it was worth every minute of it

I'm kind of in the same boat as you, been at it for maybe two months now. what helped me a lot was the app Just Learn Morse Code on the computer and also there's an app called Morse Mania on android that i use when im sitting around waiting for something. the gamification thing keeps me from getting bored i guess

one thing that actually surprised me was how much it helped to just listen to actual CW on the air even when i cant copy anything. like i tune around 40 meters in the evenings and just let it wash over me and slowly some of the shorter common words like CQ and 73 started jumping out at me without even thinking about it. probably not the most scientific method but it felt encouraging