so ive been a tech for about 8 months and i keep seeing people talk about how useful CW is and i guess i want to try learning it but i have no idea where to start. like do people just memorize the dots and dashes on paper first or is there a better way to do it? i tried printing out one of those charts and staring at it for a few days and it just kind of bounced off my brain. im not trying to upgrade to general just yet but the CW thing keeps nagging at me. someone at my local club said something about a koch method but i didnt really understand what they meant. is there an app or something that actually works or do people mostly use real equipment to practice

yeah the chart thing doesnt really work, or at least it didnt for me. you really want to learn the sounds not the symbols, thats the whole thing people get wrong at first. the koch method your club guy mentioned is basically where you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you dont move on until you can copy them reliably, then you add one more and so on. sounds slow but it trains your brain to hear the rhythm instead of counting dots and dashes which will kill you later when speeds get higher.

i used an app called morse-it for a while and it was decent, but honestly the thing that actually made it click for me was just getting on the air and listening to slow speed nets. there used to be a bunch of QRS nets specifically for beginners, FISTS has some stuff, you might look them up. just listening even when you cant copy everything helps more than you'd think.

lcwo.net is free and its basically the koch method built into a website, thats what i used. i did like 15-20 minutes a day and after a few months i could actually copy most of a QSO at slow speeds. the key thing everybody told me and i ignored at first is dont go up in speed too fast, i kept bumping it up before i was ready and had to go back down which was kind of demoralizing. also just get a cheap straight key and start sending too even before you feel ready, something about sending it yourself helps it stick in a different way than just listening