so ive been wanting to learn CW for a while now and i finally decided to just do it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i learn the alphabet first and just memorize dits and dahs on paper, or do i just jump straight into listening? i tried looking up some youtube videos but some of them are teaching it completely differently than others and now im more confused than when i started

someone at my club mentioned something called the Koch method i think, and someone else said Farnsworth spacing is the way to go, and i dont really understand the difference between those two things or which one i should be doing. im not in any rush to get to a specific speed or anything, i just want to eventually be able to do some QSOs on 40m or wherever. any advice from people who actually went through this process would be great because the internet is kind of all over the place on this

okay so the Koch method basically means you start with just 2 characters, learn them really well at a decent speed like 15-20 wpm, then add one more character only after you can copy those first two reliably. the idea is you never slow the actual character speed down, you just add more space between them at first if you need to, thats the Farnsworth part. they work together, not against each other. a lot of people try to learn at 5 wpm and then they just end up counting dits and dahs in their head which will absolutely wreck you later when you try to speed up.

honestly the best thing i can point you to is LCWO.net, its free and it does Koch method by default and you can set all the speed parameters yourself. just do like 10-15 minutes a day consistently and dont skip days, thats way more important than doing hour long sessions a few times a week. also dont try to write everything down at first, just listen. the goal is to hear the letter, not decode it. took me about 4 months to get comfortable enough for slow QSOs and probably another 6 before i felt like i wasnt panicking the whole time on a real contact

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, started about 3 months ago. what helped me was the app called Morse Mania, its on android at least not sure about iphone. its pretty gamified which sounds dumb but it kept me coming back. i also found that listening to actual on-air CW even when i couldnt copy any of it helped somehow, just getting my ear used to the rhythm of it. W1AW does code practice transmissions on a schedule which you can find on the ARRL site, they do it at different speeds so you can find something thats not totally hopeless to follow along with

the one thing i wish someone told me earlier is that some letters just click immediately and others will bug you for weeks, like i had a really hard time with C and Y for some reason. just keep going i guess