so ive been a technician for about a year and a half and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is and i kind of want to learn it but i have no idea where to start. i tried one of those apps a while back and just got frustrated and gave up after like two weeks. i dont know if i was doing it wrong or just impatient or what.

is there like a method that actually works for beginners or is it just one of those things where you grind forever until it clicks. i can type pretty fast so i feel like my brain should be able to handle it but copying what im hearing is a completely different skill i guess. anyway just curious what worked for people who actually made it to where they can use it on the air

the thing that finally made it click for me was stopping trying to count dits and dahs. like seriously if you're sitting there going dot dot dash in your head you're already doing it wrong for anything above about 5 wpm. the Koch method is what most people recommend and honestly it works, you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm and you dont add a new one until you can copy the current set at like 90% accuracy. sounds slow at first but it builds the right habit of hearing the whole character as a sound instead of individual elements.

LCWO dot net is free and it does Koch, thats where i spent most of my early practice time. just do like 15 minutes a day consistently, dont try to marathon it, your brain needs time to process between sessions. took me about 4 months to get to where i could have a basic qso and i was not particularly talented at it

im kind of in the same boat as you lol been meaning to learn for ages. someone in my local club told me to just listen to a lot of cw on the bands even before you can copy it, like just get your ear used to the rhythm of it. not sure if thats actually good advice or not but it seemed to make sense. i downloaded morse mania on my phone which is decent for drilling individual letters but yeah copying actual qsos is a whole other thing i havent gotten there yet either