Learn Morse Code

Why not just memorise the chart?

Because it works, right up to the point where it stops working.

Learning from a chart means learning each letter as a picture: S is three dots. When you then hear it, you count the dots, picture them, and look up the letter. That is three steps, and it caps out at about ten words per minute. Everyone who learns this way hits the same wall, and getting past it means unlearning the picture and starting again by ear.

The way around it is to never build the picture in the first place. Each character is learned as one sound from the very first minute, at a speed too fast to count. There is nothing to count, so nothing to unlearn.

The Koch method

Ludwig Koch, a German psychologist, published the approach in the 1930s. It inverts the obvious plan in two ways.

• Full speed from the first minute. The characters are sent at 18 to 20 words per minute even on day one. You get thinking time from longer gaps instead, which is Farnsworth timing. Slow characters would only teach you a sound you would later have to replace.
• Two characters, not twenty-six. You start with K and M and add a third only when the first two are automatic. Koch's students reached full speed in a fraction of the usual time.

K and M come first because they differ in every element: -.- against --. Nothing about them can be confused, so your ear has an easy first job.

What this trainer does with your mistakes

Characters you keep getting wrong come up more often. A character you have never heard gets priority, one you always get right fades into the background, and a freshly added one keeps appearing until it settles.

When you miss one, the trainer shows what it actually was and plays it again. That matters: without the correction you would be practicing the wrong association, and a wrong association is harder to remove than an empty space.

The figures behind the exercise are under Your figures, including which characters you confuse. Those are usually the pairs that share a beginning - S and H, U and V - and knowing which ones trouble you is half the fix.

How to practice

• Five to ten minutes a day. Not an hour on Sunday. This is a reflex, and reflexes are built by frequency, not duration.
• Do not write the dots. The moment you write dots you are back to counting. Write the letter or nothing.
• Leave the character speed alone. If it feels too fast, lower the effective speed and let the gaps grow. The characters themselves should stay at 18 or above.
• Expect a plateau. Everyone stalls somewhere, usually around the tenth character. It passes if you keep the sessions short and regular.

Somewhere around fifteen characters, words start to arrive as words rather than as strings of letters. That is the moment the whole thing becomes interesting.