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Why is it that some days your mind just does not want to do this. One just goes blank. I do not understand why some days I do okay and some days my mind just does not want to do this. Most days I miss 1 to 3 per set. But other days I may miss 10. What the heck. I just feel like giving up. I may never get this done and I am on 35. I do not want to give up but I am a bit tired of beating myself up over this.
Some days you know this and the next you just cannot do it. I have been working on this for 2 years. I have never had to work on something this long with so little results. I am told most people learn this over there weekend. At the most 2 months. I am angry once again. It is a sad thing to admit that one is stupid.

73
Lynn

Most people don't learn this over a weekend. I'm not entirely sure how long it takes folk, on average, but my guess is at least a few months.

It took me two years to realise the incremental Koch process didn't work for me, but I only got to 16 or so in that time. If you've got to 35 then just bite the bullet, study the remaining 5 all together in isolation, and jump to 40 (or just leave Koch behind and start using Morse somehow or other).

Hi Rick,

I do not think you meant to help me BUT you have. You have helped me a great deal. I thank you for this encouragement. I have not had anyone say this is hard to learn. I have never heard anyone say out loud that they had worked on this for 2 years and only gotten to 16. I find this a great help. Thank you for being so greatly honest.

Lynn

Lynn, have you ever tried another morse learning program? Maybe the Koch metod is not the wright one for you?

Lynn: The trouble with Koch is that the further you get, the less often the new characters turn up, but you've got most of them if you've reached lesson 35. Doing something to ensure you hear the new characters a lot might help.

Leon: I know Koch doesn't work for everybody. I eventually stepped back and had a good think about what I was trying to do. It seemed to me, in the end, that I needed to learn Morse the same way I learned to read and write, and that meant learning the whole Morse alphabet (with numbers and some punctuation) in one go. I used the "MP3 practice files" option to make files full of "A B C", "1 2 3", "AA AB AC", and so on...

I've been trying to learn Morse for almost five years now. I've got to the point where I can usually manage about 8wpm for five minutes, but I don't often last as much as a minute at 12wpm, and at 20wpm I only catch the odd word.

I've stopped learning cw also for a month or 4/5, because i could not hear the sound of the signs.
But, after a while i started it all over again, at lesson 1.
Once i did that, at a lower speed, i started to hear the sounds, en began recognizing the signs by their sound.
After that, i put the speed up, and since then i can use morsemachine at 25wpm, and the lessons at 14 wpm.
I don't believe that there are people who can learn cw in a week ...
I'm learning cw here for almost two years now, and finally i get somewhere.
What they say is, keep practicing, day after day. And sometimes you just have to step back for a while.
If you are trying, and it doesn't go as you hoped for, then step back a day or two, and after that go back two or three lessons, and go on.
That is what i did many times, and after a while it worked for me.
And also listen on the different bands, and try to find a cw qso that goes slowly, and see what you can understand.
Do that as much as possible. Only receiving, not sending.
And sometimes you just have to let cw for what it is for a few days.
If all these things don't work, than try to find a different way of learning cw.
It is like learning to drive a car: some people need just a few lessons, others need many lessons.
In the end you will be able to drive the cw morse highway.

Wee there's plenty of free advise around for people learning morse, but not very of it much really applies to people who find they're making much slower progress that they would hope to do.

As one of the slower learners I have noticed a few things.
Here are the two most significant as far as I'm concerned.

1/ Make sure you are listening on audio frequencies at which your ears can best distinguishing the code.
I notice my ears have a wide range of differing sensitivities at various frequencies.
At the worst frequencies in the mid range I can barely pick up anything and my success rate drops right down.

2/ Don't spend all your time testing your progress because all that typing or writing things down diverts some of your attention.
Buy a cheap mp3 player, make up some files using ebook2cw and just listen ( see http://morse-rss-news.sourceforge.net/artskill.pdf Chapter 7 ).
You can do 5 minutes listening in odd moments several times a day.
It's all about the number of times you hear each morse character and then think of the corresponding letter, BUT you have to be concentrating on the listening and associating.