so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and keep seeing people talk about cw and honestly it sounds really cool but i have no idea where to even begin. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper or is there some better way? i tried printing out one of those charts and staring at it for a few days but none of it is sticking. i know the code isnt required anymore but i still want to learn it properly, not just fake my way through a qso. any suggestions on where to start would be appreciated, or if there are apps that people actually use and not just ones that get recommended because theyre popular

yeah the chart thing doesnt really work, at least not for most people. the big thing everyone keeps saying and its actually true is dont learn it visually, learn it by sound from day one. like your brain needs to hear dit dah as a letter not see dot dash and then translate it. there's an app called morse-it and also the lcwo website which is free and uses the koch method which basically starts you with just two characters and drills them until you can recognize them without thinking, then slowly adds more. i spent about three weeks just on K and M before moving on and it felt stupid slow but honestly when i finally got on air it clicked way faster than when i tried to memorize the whole alphabet at once years before that. also dont go too slow with the character speed, like 20wpm character speed with extra spacing between words is better than 5wpm everything, its called farnsworth spacing and it trains you to hear patterns not count dits

just downloaded an app called ham morse a while back and messed around with it on my commute. cant say im fluent or anything but i can copy maybe 8-10 wpm on a good day after like 4 months of casual practice. the key for me was just doing 10 minutes every single day rather than an hour on weekends, consistency is everything with this kind of thing. also there are slow cw nets out there specifically for people learning, the SKCC has one i think and there are a few others depending on your region. actually getting on air and copying real signals even badly is way more motivating than just drilling apps forever