Character Explorer

Where the confusions come from

The list on the right is not copied from anywhere. It is calculated from the structure of the code itself: the Morse alphabet is a binary tree, and every character has neighbors - the ones reached by adding an element, dropping one, or flipping a dot into a dash.

Those neighbors are exactly what your character turns into when something goes wrong. Send S with one element too many and you have sent H. Lose the last element of U and the receiver writes I. This is not a list of things beginners happen to muddle; it is the list of what the code itself makes easy to muddle.

If you have used the trainer on this device, your own mistakes appear underneath - what you actually read this character as, and how often.

Two speeds, one purpose

The slow button is not there to make things easier. It plays the same character with the same proportions, just stretched - which is the one thing a beginner must hear: that the shape does not change with speed. A dash is three dots at 8 words per minute and three dots at 25.

What does change is what you can do with it. Below about 10 words per minute there is time to count elements; above it there is not, and the rhythm has to be recognized whole. That transition is the whole difficulty of learning Morse, and it is why the trainer works at full character speed from the first minute.