so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, got my general, and everyone keeps telling me i should learn CW but i honestly have no idea where to start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there a better way? ive seen people mention something called koch method but i dont really understand how thats different from just learning the alphabet

also does anyone actually use morse code regularly or is it mostly just a thing people learn and then never touch again. genuinely asking because i dont want to spend months on something i wont use. my buddy at the club said once you get it you can hear a signal that would be unreadable on SSB and that got me interested but idk

any advice on where to even begin would be great, im kind of lost on this one

the chart thing is basically the wrong approach, or at least thats what burned me when i tried the first time years ago. you end up counting dits and dahs in your head which makes you slow and it never really clicks as a sound. the Koch method basically starts you at full speed on just two characters, like K and M or whatever the program picks, and you dont move on until you can copy them at like 90% accuracy. the idea is your brain learns to hear the whole character as a sound pattern instead of counting individual elements.

LC software is what a lot of people use, its called Just Learn Morse Code i think, or there's an app called Morse Toad that some guys at my club swear by. honestly the one that worked for me was just hamradiosolutions.net or something, ive slept since then. the key thing everyone will tell you and youll probably ignore at first is dont slow down the speed, use farnsworth timing instead where the characters come fast but theres longer space between them. took me maybe 6 months of like 15 minutes a day before i could have a basic QSO and i still wouldnt call myself fast but i can hold a ragchew on 40 meters no problem

and yeah people absolutely use it, 40 and 80 meters especially, the CW portion is always busy. DX stations you cant touch on phone youll work easy on CW once you get decent at it

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for like 3 weeks using the LCWO website which is free and browser based. its based on Koch and you can set your own speed targets. i started at 15wpm character speed with Farnsworth spacing and its been rough but i can do the first like 9 characters pretty reliably now

one thing i read was that trying to do more than 20-30 min a day doesnt really help, something about how your brain needs to consolidate the sounds overnight. dont know if thats true but i figured id mention it. also morse code ninja on youtube has a ton of practice files at different speeds which i use when im bored in the car, just listening not copying, and that seems to help too