so ive been thinking about getting into cw for a while now but i honestly dont even know where to start. i can barely recognize a dit from a dah when i hear it and everything i find online either assumes you already know some of it or is just a list of apps i should download but doesnt really explain like... the actual process

did you guys just sit down and memorize the whole alphabet first or is there a method where you kind of learn as you go. someone at my club mentioned something called the koch method and i looked it up but it was kind of confusing to me, like do you really just start with two characters and stick with that until youre at speed before adding more. that seems like it would take forever

also how long did it realistically take you to get to a point where you could actually make a contact. im not trying to be a cw contester or anything just want to be able to ragchew at maybe 10-12 wpm eventually

koch method is genuinely the way to go and yeah it does feel slow at first but thats kind of the whole point. the idea is your brain learns the sound of each character at full speed from day one so you never have to unlearn the habit of counting dots and dashes which is what kills most people later on. if you start slow and count, you get stuck at like 5 wpm forever.

i used the lcwo website, its free and you just work through the characters one at a time. set it to like 20 wpm character speed even if the word speed is lower, that farnsworth spacing thing helps a lot in the beginning. honestly just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently and dont skip days. i was making actual qsos somewhere around 3-4 months in but i was pretty dedicated. some people take longer and thats fine. the first contact is kind of terrifying no matter how ready you think you are but you just send qrs and most cw ops are really patient with new people

im kind of in the same boat as you, been at it for maybe 6 weeks now. what worked for me was just picking like 5 letters and drilling those until i didnt have to think about them at all, then adding more. i use an app called morse mania on my phone which is pretty good for just random letter practice during lunch or whatever

the thing nobody told me is that copying by hand is totally different from just recognizing letters in an app. like i could identify characters fine but then i tried to actually write them down while listening and it fell apart completely. so now i practice writing too which feels dumb but apparently thats just how it goes