so ive been thinking about learning CW for a while now, got my general license last year and people keep telling me its worth learning but i honestly have no idea how to even approach it. like do you just memorize the dits and dahs for each letter or is there some method that actually works better? i tried looking it up and theres a ton of different apps and websites and courses and i dont know which ones are actually useful vs just noise. someone mentioned the koch method to me at a club meeting but didnt really explain what that meant. also does it matter what speed you start at? im not trying to do contests or anything just want to be able to have a basic qso someday

koch method is definitely the way to go, forget trying to memorize the patterns as dots and dashes because that'll slow you down forever. the whole idea is you learn each character at full speed from the start, like 20wpm or whatever, but the spacing between letters and words is stretched way out so you have time to think. as you get more letters down you tighten up the spacing. LCWO.net is free and does this whole thing for you, just make sure you dont look at the visual representations of the code while youre learning or your brain latches onto that instead of just hearing the sound as a letter directly.

also just use it every day even if its only 10 minutes. the people who try to cram for an hour once a week never really get it to stick. took me about 4 months of daily practice before i felt comfortable enough to call CQ and not panic when someone answered back

yeah i went through this same thing not that long ago. i tried a couple different apps and honestly just2morse and the morse toad app both helped me in the beginning but what really clicked for me was just listening to actual qsos on the air, like tuning around 14.025 or wherever and just trying to pick out individual letters even if i couldnt copy the whole thing. feels kinda useless at first but i think it helped my ear get used to real conditions vs the perfect clean audio in the apps. also some guys at my club do a slow speed net on wednesday nights which was huge for me because theres nothing like actual pressure to make things stick lol