I found the whole learn-a-character, add-a-character Koch process thoroughly ineffective.


Yep, folks start from different places, and learn in different ways. Perseverence is necessary, but so is evaluating your progress. The really tricky thing is recognising when something you're trying isn't working. I should have dumped Koch after a couple of months rather than staggering on with it for two years...


If you're using a set of records I'd expect you'd get to the point where you knew the text on them from memory quite quickly? Maybe that actually helps the learning process?

73, Rick M0LEP

If you could find suitable text you could use quite a few of the "Koch" computer programs to send you Morse of "increasing complexity" at whatever speed you saw fit.

You could argue that the Koch method also "increases the complexity" as you progress, but it uses random characters rather than anything comprehensible. Personally, I'd swap the random gibberish for something comprehensible, as it's much easier to learn to read when what you're reading makes some sort of sense.

73, Rick M0LEP

Quite. But for some folks (probably more than care to admit it, and quite possibly the majority of folks trying to learn Morse) the bad habits have developed before they realise it. The idea that Morse code is characters made of dots and dashes is pretty widely circulated. I figure plenty of folks have already seen Morse written out as dots and dashes, with tables of the characters, and so on, long before they come to amateur radio. Even if they havn't, more than one or two of the introductory level amateur radio training books will tell them that. So will at least some of the books about Morse Code. The seeds of the bad habits have been well and widely sown. In quite a few, they'll have taken root long since. There's no point telling folk so affected to avoid those habits. It's too late, and it's pretty discouraging to be told not to develop a habit you've already developed. Advice on good ways to break the bad habits, however, might actually help...

That's fine advice for folk who really have never encountered Morse before, but for many of us who have, it's akin to saying "I wouldn't start from here" when asked for directions. For a fair proportion of folk wanting to learn Morse, the problem is not how to avoid the bad habits, it's how to break them, because they're already there.

I found it tended to hang after sending the first word unless there was no difference between character and word speeds, when it usually didn't hang. G4FON did likewise, so I assume the problem's somewhere in the way wine is working with the underlying sound system, and that's probably hardware related. Maybe I'm just unlucky that the two systems I've tried it on have both had the same problem...

I'm glad JLMC (and the other tools) have those other options. I havn't used G4FON or JLMC much because they don't work very well under wine (of whatever flavour - I've tried several) on either Mac or Linux, and I don't have any Windows PCs, but I have used LCWO to make mp3 files to help me learn Morse. The other options available deserve more attention.

Unfortunately, it's the Koch method that gets pushed, as if it were some miracle teaching method. I stuck at the Koch lessons (on LCWO, as it happens) far too long because folk kept pushing, saying "keep at the lessons, don't quit, you'll get there in the end". I should have ditched Koch, with its random characters and learn-a-character, add-a-character approach, far sooner. In retrospect, it should have been obvious to me that Koch wasn't teaching me Morse effectively by the time I'd been at it for a couple of months. That said, even the Koch learn-a-character, add-a-character approach would probably have worked better for me if, right from the start, it had used words and abbreviations (with callsigns and proper placement of punctuation once the character set included them) rather than random characters, though you'd need to re-arrange the progression to make that work well.

...and to answer the original poster's question "Can I learn CW with LCWO.net?" I'd say "Yes, you probably can, but look at ALL the options available, not just the Koch lessons, and look at other programs as well, but if you can find a real live human teacher who knows and uses Morse and is willing to teach you in person, chances are that'll be the best option."

W1AW does at least transmit words with punctuation in the right places, not the random senseless character strings the Koch systems generate. It's so much easier to learn to read when the words you read make sense.

Fair enough, I'd forgotten JLMC did that too. I used G4FON because I liked the controls it has for messing with the sounds it sends, which makes the Morse it produces sound a lot more "real" than LCWO or JLMC manage.

...but only if you can type it straight in. That was another mistake I made; trying to type in the Morse I heard. I'm not a good enough touch-typist. It was far better for me to write out what I heard long-hand, but I wasted about three months trying to type in Morse before I realised that. Of course, once I'm writing out what I hear in pencil on paper, the only thing the computer's giving me is the Morse to practice from. LCWO lets you type in what you've heard for checking, but JLMC doesn't (or didn't last time I tried it).

The second catch with pasting in text is that you already know what you're going to hear. G4FON's random QSO files get around that one, but there comes a point when you're better off listening on-air.

It'd would be really cool if the Koch-style programs could generate sensible text rather than random groups from the set of characters they're currently trying to teach. Wouldn't work much below about lesson 15, I expect, and would probably be an interesting programming challenge...

Pretty much the same way I learned to read and write. Progress is slow, but fairly steady.

It's not just a matter of commitment; I put the time in (several hundred hours over a year and a half or so), but (with the odd exception) each new character took more time to learn than the one before. Sometimes it was only a bit more, but sometimes a lot more. My early estimates were that it'd take me three years to get the characters learned. By the time I'd got to lesson 12 I'd revised that estimate to nearer ten years. For me, it was far better to make sound files of "A B C", "1 2 3", "AA AB AC", "AA BA BC" and so on, and listen to them repeatedly. At least that way I got all (or most of) the characters at least part learned fairly quickly, and I could try to make sense of QSOs on air.

Clearly the Koch random character progression method works for some. If it works for you, that's great. It does not work for everyone. Personally I think most of the time (well over a year) I spent trying to learn Morse using it was time I wasted. I should have looked at the statistics LCWO threw back at me a lot more critically, and gone elsewhere much much sooner.

If you can, find a real live human teacher, or at least a real live human to learn the code with...

I think it depends a great deal on how you read. Some folks see whole sentences. Others phrases, some just words. Most folk start off deciphering words letter by letter and speaking them aloud. Learning Morse is like learning to read and write again. The way you interpret the character you hear is going to depend a lot on the individual. Folk might hear the characters as if they were spoken words, or see them as words on a page, or in some other way. Using a code reader is going to reinforce the "words on a page" way but not the "spoken words" one.


...and a way that works for one won't work for all, because folks learn in different ways. The trick is to recognise when something's not helping, and ditch it before it causes trouble, frustration and disillusion.

I'll go with the "listen to live QSOs" advice; try to find activity that's a fraction faster than you can manage, and copy what you can. If you're going to use a code reader, try to beat it to the message, though. They tend to run a character or three behind...

73, Rick

Catch comes when you press on stubbornly down the wrong road because folks insist it's the right one. I wasted a year or more fighting through Koch lessons that weren't teaching me anything useful, trying to catch that automatic recognition thing. My brain's a lot more analytical than intuitive, and given a slivver of a chance it will analyse that sound, pull it apart, and only then decide what it was. It's not going to be fooled into skipping the analysis, so Kock's premise is all very well, and apparently works for some, but it was never going to work for me, and I should have realised that a lot sooner...