so ive been thinking about getting into cw for a while now and i finally decided to just try and do it but i honestly dont even know where to start. i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem kind of different in how they teach it and i dont know which approach is actually right. one of them does the whole alphabet in order starting with A and another one throws random letters at you right away which felt really overwhelming but someone online said thats actually better? i think its called the koch method or something like that

anyway i guess my question is how did you guys actually do it, like what actually worked. im not in a huge hurry i just dont want to spend months doing it wrong and then have to start over. also does it matter what speed you learn at from the start because ive heard conflicting stuff about that too

yeah the koch method is what most people swear by these days and honestly i think they're right. the idea is you learn at full speed from the beginning, like 15-20 wpm character speed, even if the spacing between letters is slow so you have more time to think. that way you never have to un-learn the slow dah-dit-dah counting thing that trips so many people up later. LCWO dot net is the site i used, its free and you can just work through the lessons, takes a while but it sticks

the alphabet-in-order apps are fine i guess but you end up with this weird situation where you can only copy letters you've learned so far which feels kind of artificial. with koch you're actually copying real letter combinations from the start even if its just two or three characters at first

give yourself like 15-20 minutes a day consistently rather than doing two hour sessions on weekends, that seems to matter a lot more than total hours in my experience

im pretty much in the same boat as you, started about 4 months ago. what i did was use the morse code ninja stuff on youtube, he has these videos where its just practice text at different speeds and honestly just having it on while im doing other stuff helped a lot more than i expected. like i wasnt actively studying i was just kind of half listening and letters started clicking eventually

still cant do a full qso without panicking but i can pull calls out of a pileup sometimes which felt impossible a few months ago so theres that