so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (tech, just upgraded to general last month) and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for dx and weak signal stuff. i want to learn but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do i start by memorizing the dots and dashes visually or do i just listen to stuff? i tried looking it up and theres like a million different opinions and apps and methods and now im more confused than when i started.

somebody at my club mentioned the koch method but i have no idea what that is or if its better than anything else. also how long does it realistically take before you can actually have a qso with someone? months? years? i have maybe 20-30 minutes a day to practice, sometimes less. just looking for some honest advice from people who actually went through this.

okay so the most important thing anyone told me when i was learning was to never, ever learn by looking at the dots and dashes on paper. like throw out that chart they give you. your brain will always go letter -> picture -> sound instead of just sound -> letter and youll hit a wall around 10-12 wpm that a lot of people never get past. learn it as sounds from day one.

the koch method is basically starting with just 2 characters, sent at full speed (usually 20 wpm or so), and you dont add the next character until you can copy those at like 90% accuracy. sounds brutal but it works because your brain learns the rhythm not the counting. lcwo.net is free and does this whole method for you online, theres also the app called morse-it or just the plain morse toad app, both decent. i used just.learn.morse.code app on android for a while too.

realistic timeline with 20-30 min a day... honestly probably 6-9 months before you'd feel okay on a slow qso. maybe longer. but you start recognizing stuff way earlier than that which keeps it fun. dont rush it, people who cram for weeks usually burn out.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for about 3 months now using that lcwo site the guy mentioned above. its slow going but i can copy maybe 15 characters consistently now which felt impossible when i started. the thing that helped me most weirdly was just listening to actual qsos on the air even when i couldnt understand anything yet. like i'd tune to 40m around 7.050 and just listen while i was doing something else. starts to feel less like noise after a while.

also somebody on here or maybe reddit told me to practice at the speed you want to eventually operate at even if you miss a ton, dont slow everything way down to like 5 wpm because then you just learn slow and have to relearn later. not sure if thats exactly the same as the koch thing or what but it made sense to me