so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and keep seeing people talk about CW on here and it sounds really cool but honestly i have no idea where to even start. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or is there a better way? i tried looking some stuff up but there's so many different opinions and apps and methods and i got kind of overwhelmed and gave up. someone mentioned something called the koch method to me at a club meeting but i dont really know what that means or if its better than just drilling the alphabet. im not trying to get a license or anything since obviously thats not required anymore i just want to actually be able to use it on air someday. any advice for someone starting from absolute scratch would be great

okay so the thing most people get wrong when they start is they learn the dots and dashes visually, like memorizing that A is dot-dash from a chart, and that actually makes it way harder to ever get fast enough to be useful on air. the goal from day one should be to hear the sound and recognize it, not picture the pattern in your head. that's basically what the Koch method does - you start with just two characters at a fairly fast speed, like 20wpm character speed, and you drill those until you can copy them without thinking, then you add one more character at a time. the other thing is Farnsworth spacing, where the letters are sent at full speed but with longer gaps between them so your brain has time to process. LCWO dot net is free and does all of this, its pretty much where i send everyone who asks me this. also just accept its going to be slow going at first, most people underestimate how long it takes and then quit after two weeks thinking theyre doing it wrong

i learned from the Just Learn Morse Code software a few years back, that and just listening to a lot of QSOs on 40m even when i couldnt copy anything. honestly the listening part helped more than i expected, kind of like how you pick up a language by hearing it. there's also this podcast called Morse Code Ninja that has practice audio files at different speeds which i used a ton while commuting. took me probably 6 months before i felt like i could actually have a slow QSO and not completely panic. still not fast but its enough to enjoy it