so ive been a ham for about 8 months now (got my tech last spring, general in september) and i keep reading about how CW is worth learning but every time i try to sit down and figure out where to start i just get confused about the whole process. like do you learn the alphabet first and just memorize the dots and dashes on paper, or do you go straight to listening? someone at my club said the koch method is the way to go but i looked it up and honestly i still wasnt sure how to actually begin with it practically. i downloaded lcwo.net and just kind of stared at it for a while before closing the tab

also not sure what speed i should be trying to learn at, ive seen people say 5wpm and others say start at like 20wpm which seems insane to me. is there like a rough order of operations here or does it really depend on the person. sorry if this is a dumb question, just feels like theres a lot of conflicting info out there

not a dumb question at all, pretty much everyone goes through exactly this. the thing that actually worked for me after years of half-attempts was forcing myself to never look at a chart. like not once. the whole point of the koch method and really any modern approach is that your brain needs to hear the sound and just know the letter, not go through some visual translation step in your head because that completely falls apart at any real operating speed

so on lcwo what you do is start with just two characters, K and M i think is the default, and you just drill those at a decent character speed like 20wpm even if the overall code speed feels slow at first. that spacing between characters is the farnsworth method and it gives you time to think while still training your ear to hear the actual rhythm of each letter. once you can copy K and M at like 90% you add the next character and keep going. honestly takes a few weeks of daily practice, even just 10-15 minutes a day, before it starts clicking

the single biggest mistake people make is doing 5wpm from the start because then you just end up counting dots and dashes in your head and you have to unlearn that later. just trust the process and dont skip ahead or go back, the frustration early on is totally normal

yeah i went through this same thing like a year ago. what finally got me off the fence was just using the morse code ninja videos on youtube, the guy has a whole progression and you dont really have to think about what to do next, you just follow along. i think i did about 20 minutes every morning before work for maybe two months before i felt like i could actually copy simple words without totally losing my mind

also the Just Learn Morse Code software is free and works pretty well if you prefer something on your desktop instead of the browser. i bounced between a few things honestly. the main thing i'd say is just pick one method and stick with it for at least a month before deciding it isnt working, thats where i kept failing before i finally made progress