so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about CW and how great it is and i figured id try to learn it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i just memorize the dots and dashes on a chart or what? i tried that for like a week and i can recognize maybe 5 letters if i see them written out but as soon as someone actually sends it i cant hear anything except noise. feels like im missing something fundamental here. is there a specific order to learn the letters or some method that actually works better than just staring at a chart? ive seen people mention something called the Koch method but i dont really understand what that means in practice

yeah ditch the chart thing immediately, that was my mistake too and it set me back probably two months. the whole point is you need to hear the characters as sounds not think of them as dots and dashes. like the letter K shouldnt be dash dot dash in your head it should just be... K. the sound of it.

Koch method is basically you start with just two characters, usually K and M because theyre easy to distinguish, and you practice at full speed like 15-20wpm until you can copy them reliably, then you add one more letter. slowly building up. LCWO dot net is where most people do it, its free and you can set it up right there. also look up the Farnsworth method which spaces out the characters but sends each one fast so your brain learns the rhythm not the counting.

honestly the biggest thing is just consistency. 15 minutes every single day beats two hours on a weekend. i probably had the full alphabet in a few months doing it that way but i wasnt super disciplined about it either

just wanted to say im in basically the same boat as you so watching this thread. i downloaded some app called Morse Mania which seems decent for the letter recognition part but i have no idea if im doing it the right way either. the guy above me seems to know what hes talking about so im gonna try that LCWO site