so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, general class, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever else. i get it, i want to learn. but every time i try to figure out how to actually start learning it i go down some rabbit hole and end up more confused than when i started.

like some people say learn the alphabet first with flashcards or whatever, other people say no you have to do the koch method, and then theres the whole thing about whether you should learn at slow speeds or fast speeds with longer gaps. i tried one of those apps for like a week and it felt like nothing was sticking at all. im not sure if i was doing it wrong or if im just bad at this.

does anyone have experience actually going from zero to being able to have a real qso? how long did it take and what did you actually use to practice. any advice would help honestly

Koch method is honestly the way to go, dont let anyone talk you into learning it slow. the whole point of starting at like 20wpm character speed with farnsworth spacing is that your brain learns the sounds as whole characters instead of counting dots and dashes. if you learn it slow you end up having to relearn it later when you want to actually copy at a real speed, i watched a friend go through exactly that and it cost him months.

i used the LCWO website, its free and its basically designed around Koch. you just start with K and M and add a new character every time you hit 90% on a session. it sounds painfully slow at first because youre only working with 2 letters but just trust the process. i went from nothing to being able to hold a basic exchange in about 4 months, maybe 15-20 minutes of practice a day. the key thing nobody tells you is that you cant cram it. 15 minutes daily beats 2 hours on a saturday by a mile, your brain needs sleep to consolidate it or whatever.

also once you get enough characters under your belt, start listening to actual qso recordings even if you cant copy all of it yet. just having it in your ears helps a lot more than i expected.

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using the morse code ninja videos on youtube and theyre pretty good. the guy has a whole progression and he explains the farnsworth thing better than most stuff i found. i think im a few weeks in and letters are starting to feel more automatic which is what eveyrone says you want.

one thing that helped me was just having it playing in the background sometimes, not like actively trying to copy, just ambient. not sure if thats actually doing anything scientifically but it feels like it helps me recognize the rhythm of certain letters faster now