so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and i keep reading about CW and people saying its worth learning but i genuinely have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there some other way people do it? i tried that once and got maybe 5 letters in before giving up because it felt completely useless without being able to actually hear it

ive seen some apps mentioned here and there, lcwo.net gets brought up a lot i think, but i dont really know if thats the right approach or if theres something better now. also i have no idea what speed to even try to learn at. someone told me to start at like 5 wpm but someone else said thats actually bad and teaches you bad habits? im confused honestly

any advice welcome, even just what worked for you personally would help

the 5 wpm thing being bad advice is real, thats the old way where people would count dits and dahs in their head and it becomes a crutch thats really hard to unlearn later. what you want is the Koch method or something close to it, where you learn at a higher character speed like 20 wpm but with longer gaps between the characters so you have time to process. LCWO is actually fine for this, just set character speed high and effective speed low and work through the letters one at a time. the idea is your brain learns to recognize the sound of each letter as a whole sound rather than breaking it into pieces.

honestly the biggest thing is just doing a little bit every single day rather than cramming. like 15 minutes daily will get you further than 2 hours on a saturday. it took me probably 6 months of pretty casual practice before i could copy anything on the air and longer before i was comfortable actually making contacts, but it does click eventually

im kind of in the same boat as you tbh, been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone just because its there when im waiting for something. not sure if its the best but its something. also theres a guy on youtube who does videos of slow CW QSOs with the text on screen and i found that weirdly helpful just to see what an actual contact sounds like even before i could copy any of it