so ive been licensed since 2019 and always told myself id learn morse code eventually and here i am still on SSB doing nothing about it lol. anyway i finally ordered a cheap paddle off amazon (i know i know) and i borrowed a friends keyer to mess around with but honestly i have no idea what im doing. like i can hear the dit and dah but my timing is all over the place and i cant figure out if its the keyer settings or just me being bad at it.

the keyer has a speed adjustment and a squeeze keyer mode which i turned on thinking it would help but now it feels even more chaotic. should i just slow everything way down and practice letters individually or is there a better approach people use. also does the type of paddle matter this much at the beginning or should i just get comfortable with any paddle before spending money on a nicer one

oh man this brings back memories, i went through the exact same thing about three years ago. first thing id say is turn off iambic mode for now — seriously just use single lever or turn the squeeze mode off until you actually understand whats happening. iambic is great once you get the hang of things but it can really mess with your head when youre still internalizing the characters.

slow it way down, like painfully slow, 5 wpm or whatever the keyer will let you do. and dont practice random letters, learn the short ones first, E T I A N M and build from there. a lot of people swear by the Koch method where you actually start at full speed for just two characters and add more as you get them right but honestly at the very beginning just getting clean dits and dahs matters more than anything. the cheap paddle will be fine for learning, your brain cant even tell the difference yet at this stage so dont spend money on gear right now

yeah i just went through this last year and can confirm the slow it down advice is solid. i also found that just listening a ton helped way more than i expected, like just having cwcom or some practice audio on in the background while doing other stuff. your ear starts picking things up without you even trying. also look up lcwo.net if you havent already, thats what got me to actually passing characters consistently. good luck, its frustrating at first but it does click eventually