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audreygroff BG3PNP chromedome clipperinc gotgraham highpress immeesh jatamo JK1KTU Joe7 KJ7DT KO4IJJ Maly martinOK4MR Morsemallow PeterF571220 pochi pocoapoco551 RKHD test W7TLD we3u WT5O

Hello everyone!

I've been monitoring loads of live cw qso and i am getting tired of copying everything on the paper.
I hear dit and dah , my brain converts it to letters that I write down to compose a word so that my eyes can read it and send it back
to brain to be converted to image that is then converted to actual meaning. Lots of steps involved.
Would it simplify things to eliminate some steps and get directly to 'sound- image - meaning' skipping all the writings?
By that I mean, when a hear someone say word 'apple' I hear whole word, not separate characters a p p l e.
What if there was an app or software similar to Koch method that would play most used words at high speed and instead of using pencil,
you'd simply select a corresponding picture on the screen out of 5 misleading pictures. It would go from lesson 1 to say lesson 70 of most used words in qso and you'd learn them by building a picture vs sound bond in your brain.
Am I inventing something that's been invented 100 years ago and proven not to work?
I know very high speed cw works on that idea, but it takes long time to master and not all will achieve it.

What you are talking about is "copy behind" "or head copying". But really you want at least 25 or even 30 wpm effective to do that (which, according to your stats, you should be able to do).

Nothing prevents you from doing Word Training or Callsign Training and wait until you have the whole word before copying it down to paper. I am on 18wpm effective and I can't do that yet.

Hello OC-MO***,

I think most of us learn head copying after xx years of morse, but I am looking for a shortcut that will make us learn it faster and at own pace.
It would be like a Koch method but instead of single characters it will play whole word at high speed and as an answer you pick an image instead of using keyboard letters.


I don't have a degree in neurology so I don't if its going to work -but kids learn to speak this way, so why not try it with morse?

Hi Kris

Your average qso contains lots of pretty standard stuff with lots of short abbreviations.

Can you decode any of that without writing it down ?

You might be better stopping writing and just listening and seeing how much you can decode . . .

cb

Luray, what you propose is something like Duolingo but for morse code. But I don't think anybody would invest time and money for that.

When you say " kids learn to speak this way", I disagree. I didn't learn like that. Gamifying language learning doesn't pay off. In fact, nobody has become fluent with Duolingo.

Thanks Chris and OC.

I am not looking for money or time investment. I was just curious if 'sound to picture' method can work.
Just listen to formula 1 cw chew on websdr and tell me it sounds like something you can learn in few years:) I've been on lcwo since 2016 and I think there is a lot of shortcuts we can create with modern technology to learn faster. I do copy standard qso on 15-25 range without paper but its all repetitive with only few variables.

I have a feeling that the "formula 1 cw" you hear on air is computer to computer but I hope I am wrong. If all parties in a QSO tx and rx use a PC or a programmable keyer, nobody has to learn morse.

Haha, you made me laugh and curious, can humans without a computer decode psk?
But seriously I will ask a friend of mine to help me design that thing I've been telling you about and I will test it on myself.
73 brgs

Hello at all,
signin' in only yesterday I am roaming around this website and found this thread by accident.

Maybe someone is interested in my two pennies worth:

Many years ago I learned touch typing. The goal was to become a transcript writer at court cases. All trainees have to aim at high speed because during legal meetings/hearings people speak (or even argue) regardless of the transcript writer... We all learned it from scratch: beginning with just two alphabetic characters, typing on an old typewriter with a lady in front of the classroom who monotonously speaks out the letters: f j f j f j f j... At the very beginning this goes on for hours (!) and many of us fear the day won't end. A few weeks later we mastered a wider range of letters and lessons went more interesting because we learned to touch type some short words. But in the end it took nearly two years before the pick of the bunch was assigned to first enter a legal meeting in order to record it.
Today everyone of us take it for granted to walk into the courtroom and to start typing as soon as the judge opens up the session. We type everything we hear. Fully automated. Without thinking about it. No matter how slow or fast someone is speaking out, no matter how much disturbance, no matter if words are spoken with or without dialect.

What I try to say is: it all began with the exhausting repetition of two letters.
An no one of us wasted a thought nor about the speed neither about the interferences that could appear.
Because I walked this way my opinion is that our brain can develop an automatism as long as you start from the get-go and repeat things you'd like to have automated. The more automated the more repetition.
In my humble opinion your question, thread-starter Kristoffer, was charakterized only of impatience. And I do not agree with your sentence "kids learn to speak this way" - our two boys may learn the MEANING of the word "apple" maybe with a pic. But before both were able to speak out the word "apple" they have to do a lot of training with the pronunciation: from babies age on they are muttering, babbling, stammering and so on until they are able to form a first word with two letters:
Aa or wee-wee or something like that, followed by Mama, daddy and so on. So I guess even babies' learning starts with one or two letters, and your requirement to skip the hard times of boring repetition and to replace it with your suggested image method can at the utmost promote the understanding. But after understanding one has to express what one has understood - no matter if in letters or morse code. And to express it quick it has to be automatized.

If I am right? We will see. I started to learn morse only yesterday and will do this with the same method as before in learning touch typing. Time will tell if this will work.

Now let me say sorry for every mistake since english is not my native language.
All the best
Angela

Hello Angela,

Good luck learning morse! I hope you are making a good progress.
You do have to learn all characters step by step using Koch method, its easy and fun. I learned to copy on the keyboard and then I had to lear all over again for a year using pen and paper. I found that when you use pen and paper its easier to copy since you don't develope muscle memory for keyboard and "see symbols" in your head instead of relying on the muscle memory on keyboard.

Try the following: set group length to 5 (4 or 6 or even 3 may work too), set the word spacing to 6 to 8 depending on how much time you need to write down or type out the entire sequence whilst not setting it for too long so you have time to count dots and dashes, listen for the entire sequence to be completed and only then type it out or write it down. NO special software needed, LCWO can already do this.
You wan to achieve head decoding without having to write down anything in the end.

You seem to be against other software, but if you like I can offer 2 alternatives that likely no one in LCWO has tried.

Both are quite similar, one specifically made for LCWO users.

It works like this (basically):

you create a simple file of "words" you want to start hearing at higher speeds
i.e.
cq
name
rst
rig

then you use MCPT (morse code practice text) with a short list of command line options to generate an input file which you will in LCWO's Convert Text to CW.

The char and effective speed of the words NOT in your list, as well as the higher speed for those that are, will be set on the command line.

So you can listen to random words, or a text file,
containing the characters YOU want to practices (or LCWO lesson number).

For example given a IWR (instant word recognition) file like:

had
little

And an Input file like:

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb. Mary..... etc.

You could hear cw with: had and little sent at say
30 wpm, while the rest of the song was sent at 15 wpm or 15/10 wpm.

Eventually, you grow the IWR file as more short words become recognized as a unique sound.


A similar tool is: txt2cw. In this case it creates MP3 or WAV files. It can convert an entire book into a collection of files. This tool is slightly more feature rich for the IWR feature.
It how ever, is currently only available for Windows 64 for sure (32 bit probably fine but untested). It does also require you PC to have the Perl language - free, easy to install, YOU WILL NOT NEED TO KNOW ANY PERL PROGRAMMING.

code is at:

qsl.net/wa2nfn/morse_code_practice_text (includes a complete User guide with examples).

or
qsl.et/wa2nfn/txt2cw

WEB page will let you listen to some SHORT demos of the feature.

73 WA2NFN