so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, tech class, just upgraded to general last month and im kind of curious about CW. i know its not required anymore but something about it just seems cool and i keep seeing people talk about it like its this whole other side of the hobby that i'm missing out on.

my problem is i have no idea where to start. ive downloaded a couple apps and tried just listening to random morse on youtube but it just sounds like noise to me. i cant tell where one letter ends and another begins, it all just blurs together. is that normal at the beginning or am i doing something wrong. also whats a realistic timeframe before you can actually have a QSO using it

yeah that blurring together thing is completely normal, pretty much everybody goes through that at first. the thing people get wrong is they start by trying to learn what each dit-dah pattern looks like on paper, like memorizing that A is dit-dah, and that approach sort of works but it makes you a decoder instead of a reader if that makes sense. you end up counting dits and dahs in your head and at any real speed thats just not sustainable.

what actually worked for me was the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net that does it properly. you start with just 2 characters played at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new character when you can copy the ones you have at like 90% accuracy. the key is keeping the character speed high even if the spacing between characters is slow at first, thats called Farnsworth timing and it trains your brain to hear letters as sounds not patterns. took me about 4 months of 20 minutes a day before i felt comfortable enough to get on 40m and call CQ in CW, first reply scared me half to death honestly but it worked out

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been messing around with morse for a few weeks now. i use an app called Morse Mania which is pretty decent for drilling individual letters. one thing i heard though and i think its true is you really shouldnt practice for more than like 20-30 mins at a time cause your brain just stops absorbing it after a while. also there are some youtube channels that do slow QSO examples which helped me start to hear the rhythm of an actual contact instead of just random characters