so ive been a tech for about 8 months and im starting to think about upgrading to general eventually and i keep hearing people talk about cw like its this whole separate thing you have to dedicate yourself to. i know its not required for the license anymore but honestly it kind of sounds cool and i want to try learning it.

my question is just like... where do you even start. do you memorize the chart first or is that the wrong way to do it. i downloaded one app that just shows you the dots and dashes visually and it felt weird, like im not sure if im doing it right. someone at my club said to learn by sound not by sight but then how do you even begin if you dont know what any of it sounds like yet. feels like a chicken and egg thing

also how long did it take people realistically, not the "i knew a guy who learned in two weeks" stories but like average normal people

okay so the visual chart thing is pretty much the worst way to learn and your club guy is right about the sound part. the way that actually works for most people is something called the Koch method, where you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm and you drill those until you can copy them reliably, then you add one more character at a time. never slowing down the character speed is the key thing. if you use Farnsworth spacing you can add gaps between characters so you have time to think, but the actual dits and dahs stay at full speed so your brain learns the rhythm as a sound pattern not as something you count.

LCWO dot net is free and a lot of people swear by it for Koch method training. also the app Just Learn Morse Code on windows does it well. i'd avoid anything that has you memorizing the chart visually, youll hit a wall around 5-7wpm and never get past it because your brain is converting instead of just hearing.

realistic timeline, i got to about 10wpm copy in maybe 4 or 5 months doing maybe 15-20 minutes a day. some days i skipped. it wasnt fast but it stuck. the people who learn in two weeks are either lying or they did like 3 hours a day which is not sustainable for most of us

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for a few weeks now. one thing that helped me that nobody mentioned when i started is just listening to actual qsos on the bands even when you cant copy anything yet. like just having it on in the background while you do other stuff. i dunno if thats scientifically the right way but it made the sounds feel less alien when i went back to drills

also morse.ninja is another site worth checking out, it has a lot of different practice modes