so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and mostly just doing FM stuff on my handheld but i keep seeing people talk about CW and honestly it seems really cool but also kind of impossible to learn at my age (im 34 fwiw). i tried doing some youtube videos a while back and just got frustrated and gave up. not sure if theres a method thats actually better than just listening to random stuff until it clicks or if theres like a structured way to do it. i downloaded one app but i dont even remember what it was called and it just felt like memorizing the alphabet which didnt help at all when i actually heard real code. anyway is there a point where it just suddenly makes sense or does it always feel like decoding and never just... hearing words

the thing that changed it for me was switching from learning dots and dashes on paper to learning the sounds directly, like dont ever write out di-dah-dah or whatever just associate the sound with the letter straight away. look up the Koch method, thats what most people swear by now. basically you start with just 2 characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new character when you can copy the first ones at like 90% accuracy. sounds slow but it actually trains your ear the right way instead of having to translate in your head later.

LCWO dot net is free and a lot of people use it for the Koch method, its not pretty but it works. give it a few weeks of like 10-15 mins a day before you decide if its clicking or not. 34 is nothing btw i knew a guy who started at 67 and was doing contests within a year and a half

yeah the app thing never worked great for me either. what actually helped was just tuning around 40m in the evenings and trying to copy even one or two letters from QSOs even if i got nothing else. also morse code ninja on youtube has these practice files at different speeds and i just had them on in the background while doing dishes or whatever. not sure how much that actually helped versus the deliberate practice but it felt less like homework at least