Some people tell you to disregard Koch's instructions, okay - but that simply means that they are not recommending Koch's method. On the contrary, they think they are improving Koch's proven method, and you have seen how much that "helped".
I would like to put some emphasis on the fact that everyone of us is
slightly different and should understand and
adapt on himself these techniques.
A few months ago I was at my son's school, during one of the periodic parent-teacher conferences. One of the parents was complaining with one of the teachers because when her son was writing his history summary at home, they didn't know
what the teacher wanted to read. She was completely focused on satisfying the teacher instead of pursuing the real goal of writing summaries, which is exercising to catch key-points among a bunch of secondary details.
I suspect that some people tend to blindly "satisfy" the teaching program they are using, like it was a dumb penitence after which redemption will come by magic.
Instead I believe that everyone should understand what the current state of art is: and today this is very easy, given the huge amount information the internet gives us. I would like to underline "understand", because each technique, although might be explained as a series of steps to be followed blindly, it is based on some principles that should be well understood.
Then we should experiment on ourselves and keep track of expectations and result, actively tuning our learning experience.
I am one of the lucky ones, because having written my own software, I am able to try any possible exercise I can think of, while the others have to rely on what the available softwares do. However, many softwares are full of options that can be set and widely tuned.
I started with the plain vanilla Koch method, with the 90%. Soon I discovered that some letters were easy to me, while others were quite hostile.
I tried to exercise them alone, but I discovered that I could easily recognize them when in small sets, but back in the full set this exercise was useless.
So I tried to increase their frequency within the full set...
et voilĂ , in a few sessions the error count for those letters dropped to the average of the other.
There has been something that did not work on me and something else that worked very well.
Then I tried simply to listen to words at high speed, starting from the most common ones ("my", "qso", "ur", "hr", "rig", etc.), but I discovered that without a feedback, I was systematically associating some sounds to the wrong words: counterproductive for me.
I tried this further exercise: 3/4 letters, 2" pause, recorded voice that repeats these letters. During the letters and the short pause I have to spell the letters.
After a few hours with this exercise I found that my score with RufzXP suddenly doubled.
This exercise was training my brain to:
- understand characters at high speed
- memorize a few of them
- leave back those I didn't understand to "rethink" them during the pause
...all features very useful when catching callsigns.
I do believe that specific training can greatly improve our performances and reduce the learning time: after all this is true for mostly everything.
However I also believe that it is fundamental that who is training for something must have a complete comprehension of the effects that this training have on himself in relationship to the goals he wants to attain. We have to understand that a specific training produces intense but unbalanced strengths: there's no point to be able to catch callsigns at 40wpm if we don't understand the rest of the QSO if faster than 10wpm.
So we have to continuosly monitor our progress and our weakness, trying always to find a way to reinforce our weakest aspects.
Following blindly a whatever method without a complete understandment of it and of ourselves is a very good route to failure.
73 de Davide IZ2UUF