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48pod agness anight Anton2501445 Anton48 BA4SEX BD8FBG BI6NYP bravadojo cdrsfrg cwcallahanny DB3TRB DC5MHN DL0AEG DL6CQ EA4IGV ea7nj f11cka fitzowl ik5mel JA1BFD JA1BJT jgm JH2VEP JO7RAA knucker lding1316 M0VBY M0WDV m7isy MeyerSD OE4EXE oh9hdh R2BRA test tzSantos usrleon w3fnz watanabeyoshikazu

For the life of me, I just do not understand how to "move on" as many suggest when I'm not instantly able to type a character before hearing the next one. I can hold a few characters in my head to get them out onto the page, but it's inevitable that I fall behind at some point, after it's already too late to simply type some random characters and continue on with where I am supposed to be. In fact, figuring out how many characters I'm behind causes me to lose at least another 3-4, at which point I simply bail out on the exercise and refresh the page to try again.

For reference, I'm on lesson 2 after managing to finally get through lesson 1 in about 100 attempts at 25/15 (I was still able to count the dits and dahs at 20/15). I've been able to get through lesson 2 at 25/12, but I understand anything less than 15 effective wpm is considered counter-productive to move-on. I've been using the morse machine to speed up my character recognition of these 3 characters, but that's also been reinforcing that I can take my time when I don't just "get it" right away.

I understand that being able to move on from failed recognition is a crucial skill, but I have absolutely no idea how to train for that. Slowing down simply gives me enough time to get it right and keeping at 15 simply results in excessive frustration. Each time I wind up so totally lost that there is no hope of me submitting anything with the correct number of characters, so I start over and fall behind, once again, usually in the first 15-30 seconds. I can tell this is not how the system is supposed to be used, but I'm starting to think this is simply a skill I cannot learn.

You haven't been going for that long a period - only a week.

This is quite a difficult thing to learn - certainly not an easy ride.


Try exercising for shorter periods - do say 30 seconds, then have 30 seconds or a minutes rest; then do another 30 seconds etc until it all adds up to 10 mins or so.

See if you can do this twice a day.


At first it's easy to get fatigued due to the high levels of concentration needed.

After a bit you get used to it.


You just need to repeat and repeat decoding until it sinks in fully and isn't just in short term memory.

No tricks available, no shortcuts work.



Good luck with it.

Let us know how you are getting along . . .

CB

"anything less than 15 effective wpm is considered counter-productive to move-on", this might be true for someone, but might be a myth for others. To move-on, you have to be able to move, not stuck somewhere. Find a speed that you can keep moving with even it means you have to choose 15/10(or slower). After you learned all 41 letters, go back to lesson one, start over again with n/n(space is as important as dit and dah). Also, don't type the character directly, write down and then type in after a lesson to check result. I made this mistake many years ago during my first failed attempt of learning CW.

cb, your approach makes sense to me, though I'm still not sure WHAT I'm supposed to practice in those 30 seconds. Should I be doing more of the morse machine practice I mentioned to build character recognition? Should I be trying to just get through half of the lesson transcriptions at full rate? Should I be transcribing at the slower rate?

ag6, I think you're hitting on some of my confusion on the approach I replied to above. I can move at 25/12 enough to get a 100% transcription. At 25/14-15 wpm, I can transcribe well until I stumble on one character, and if more than 3-4 characters have gone by before I catch back up, it's game over. The whole idea of getting to the end of the lesson and getting less than a 100% score is incomprehensible to me, because I either got every character or I fell behind and couldn't even make a submission. Neither seems to be the correct speed from what you're describing, and it seems like I'm practicing the wrong thing regardless.

Give it a month of practicing before forming too many conclusions.

You are just getting started and getting used to it.

It could just be your ears.


Listening to morse is not a normal activity and it can take some time to get used to it.


You may well not know the best speed to go at yet . . . .


Also we don't know anything about you - so all "advice" is sort of anecdotal - except "keep going and don't give up".


Better to get through all 40 lessons, then worry about speed etc.


There seem to be some traps to avoid . . .

1/ Unless you can touch type without thinking - be wary of forming a link between morse and keyboard, unless you want to carry a keyboard around with you and read back what you just typed - OR - you are a military operator and all you get is coded messages anyway.

2/ Don't move on too soon - else you may find the lessons learned are only in short term memory and they vanish about lesson 10 and you have to start again.

3/ If you can't hear it you can't decode it - make sure your headphones work properly and you have chosen an audio frequency at which your ears can distinguish dits and dah. Watch the volume too.

4/ Try to do 2 x 10 mins of decoding each day - but break it up into small enough bursts with rests in between so that you don't become fatigued and stop decoding towards the end of each burst.

5/ You probably want decoding to become an automatic process like walking or driving, where you don't have to think about it - it just happens. This happens by repeat-repeat-repeat like lots of other things - but you must be actually decoding - so do whatever to make that happen.

4/ Don't overdo it. You are not body-building. You need to be decoding for it to become automatic - so too much is as bad as too little.


cb

cb, that helps a fair amount. For what it's worth, I touch-type at about 80-90 WPM on a good day, though I have always struggled in official tests with wanting to go back and correct any errors instead of letting them be. I'll try setting things at the less-frustrating 25/12 for now and build up the exercises as you suggest and probably move to the next lesson if I can get through the current one twice at that speed.

Thanks!

This is the kind of question I have no sympathy for, sorry. What is the purpose of training if not to try and try and try until you make it? Just stick to a speed and move to next lesson until you get 90% correct. Does it take ages? Yes, it does. The instructions are clear. I don't get it why people come with complicated answers and we can't see if they practice what they preach because they have a private profile.

OC - rote practice without understanding what to improve or how to improve is a recipe for bad habits in every skill one can learn. That is among the reasons folks here understand and express the need not to drop the character speed to a point where you can count the dits and dahs, for example.

While the instructions may be clear to you, I expressed specifically that I am not understanding the nature of just typing something, anything in order keep up with the transcription and not get hung-up on a character and falling behind the entire thing. CB's explanation gave me confidence that I'm not building bad habits by proceeding at a lower WPM effective at which I can keep up with the entire thing regardless, so I am proceeding with 25/12 accordingly.

That said, as yet, nobody has expressed what the practice and skill is of simply writing something down to keep up or what their experience was learning at the beginning and falling behind. The exercise as designed, still seems to expect you'll get the exact number of characters and that some of them will be wrong, not that you'll miss a large portion of them. To that end, it still feels as if I am practicing this incorrectly or not properly understanding the instructions.

As for your sympathies, you're not doing any favors to the reputation of hams as cranky old gatekeepers

Oh dear!

It is actually not expected that you get the exact number of characters. The intention is that if you don't get one or more characters decoded in time, you let them go and just type in the next ones that you recognize. When I use the lessons and stumble / fall behind, I usually let the rest of that group-of-5 go and try to catch the next group . (Since there is a bigger pause between the groups, it is easier to catch back on there, than in the middle of a group.)

There is a technical limitation in the way the lessons are implemented on this site, though. You must enter at least one character per group-of-5! It doesn't matter if that character is right or wrong, just the group has to be present in your result. Otherwise the result-check will lose orientation and mark everything after the missing group as incorrect. For that reason, if I miss an entire group-of-5, I just type an "x" in its place.

You can leave out individual characters within a group-of-5 though, that isn't a problem. The result-check will find the correct characters and match them with the sent characters.

Oh dear indeed! I was surprised to see your post. Enough with the bullying!

Saseith seems willing to put in the work, and everyone give the advice to stick with it as well. Even if you're lacking sympathy there should be some way of expressing that (or don't) in a less discouraging way.

And if you want to look at my profile to discern to what degree I should be allowed an opinion be my guest.

Amateur radio, and radiotelegraphy even more, requires a certain level of mental toughness. It's not for everybody and it was not meant to be. It's brutal. It has been used in WW1 and WW2 to defeat enemy lines. Many start and only a few get to the end. It's what makes the game more interesting. If one thinks that any sort of veiled criticism is bullying, they are better suited to Tiktok, Instagram or Reddit.

This explanation is tremendously helpful, thank you! I'll give just skipping characters and jumping to the next group a try as you suggest to only lose maybe 2-3 characters.

"anything less than 15 effective wpm is considered counter-productive to move-on"
I am not sure this is always true, or at least others think differently. For example https://cwops.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/LCWO-ICR-Guidelines-1.5.pdf suggests to start at 25/6 (or 30/6) and complete all athe lessons, then move effective speed slowly up and up, but as long your error rate is negligible.

For example, what allowed me to keep practicing to lesson 25 has been to set speed effective speed 3 (you can laugh, it's ok :-). What seems important is to have character speed so fast you cannot analyze or count dits or dahs, but just associate the pattern to a character. For me that is 25 character speed.
When doing the lessons practice I simply speak each character loud, then write it with a pencil, and only at the and I copy them all together on the box to check the result.

G4fon recommended learning at the speed you want to learn. https://youtu.be/jBmuoLUV1LM?t=1996

This is fine if you can do it. - but why are you asking on this forum then ?

If ( IF IF IF ) you can't manage to learn like that, then you have a choice to make - keep trying, or try slower or try Farnsworth.

Your choice.

You need some way of ascertaining your aptitude - because that's the final arbiter - so I certainly wouldn't advise starting slow eg 25/5 etc UNTIL you know if you need to.

Maybe after a couple of week's trying you start to speed up because your ears are now more used to it.

If you can't learn at 25/25 etc because it sounds like gibberish then you can give up like maybe 90% of starters or put up with your actual abilities ( probably normal like most people not high aptitude ) and try something else.

Your choice.

I would say that if you aren't making continual progress, you will soon become disillusioned with it all - but you may not.

Some people have a whole hobby out of 2 years training. Not many though.

You choice.

This forum is mostly working for people who are wondering ( why is it so hard; I thought it would take a few weeks; am I doing it wrong etc ) - but we don't know anything about you - nor will we ever - so we can point out potential issues ( typing, hearing, make progress, you want it to become automatic "head copy" etc ) and that's it.

Then it's your choice.


In my view its still worth learning even if you are "stuck" at 10 wpm.

15wpm - that's the distress call speed - is ok on the air, 20wpm probably average and many people only want one day's morse QSOs per year anyway.

Your choice. Maybe you will speed up with practice.


Else I just say keep going, stick with it and do 2 x 10 mins decoding per day - but avoid overdoing it with long sessions because you are repeating decoding until it becomes automatic not building muscles and fatigue means you are not decoding so not learning.

You choice.


Learning at 25/3 etc means more time spent speeding up - is that better than giving up ?

Will it take longer then keeping trying at 25/25 give it a month and see how you are going. Then . . .

Your choice.


Good luck with it all.

Keep going.

Let us know how you are getting on.

Don't concern yourself with anyone else's speeds - just sort out yourself as best you can.

This is not a trivial exercise for most people. Being told it is is what destroys ambitions.

YMMV

cb

Bullying might be the wrong word. I was looking for something with a meaning of talking down to people, implying they are lazy and possibly a bit thick for not being able to follow simple instructions, in a sort of tired-of-it-all way. English isn't my first language, so there might be a better way of putting it.

Anyhow, I think we would agree on what you said in your latest post more than you'd think. Tiktok and Instagram makes people soft is a really disingenuous way, and I think we'd all be better off if they'd be shut down. Reddit has lots of corners that aren't exactly healthy in that respect either. It's just I don't equate asking for advice about how to put your hard work to the best use to being soft.

Getting back to the topic of this post, I struggle with loosing track as well. I mainly practice by downloading mp3 files with words, and listen to them without writing. Whenever I loose track in the middle of a word I try to gather enough presence to wait for the next space and continue on the next word. I do this in qso's as well, and on a good day I get most of what the other station is sending.

Keep at it, saseith! The day you complete a qso all the countless hours will be worth it.

I definitely had not understood that it was possible to skip characters in the system to catch up to the next word block, so that's a huge revelation, so far. That definitely makes the concept of the error rate make a lot more sense to me than what I had pictured of expecting people to immediately be able to keep up with the rate and simply be wrong some of the time.

LCWO has three facilities to make things easier. You can make the groups shorter, you can increase delay between characters (which you do) and you can increase the delay between groups to have time for recalling and writing/typing after the group is played. Lowering character speed below 25-30 is highly discouraged so I don't count it. Of course, each of those three has the drawback that our brains get used to it and reducing the delays and increasing the group size later can be quite painful. But it is better than being stuck, making no progress and giving it up sooner or later (happened to me a few times).

Also, the MorseMachine in addition to group training can be very useful. For me, it was invaluable with pairs of characters that I notoriously confused. Confusing "H" with "5" is a classic, but for some reason my brain confused "R" with "K" and "U" with "D." Go figure.

I confuse "K" and "R" all the time - which is a pain since my initials are KRT and my name has two "R"s in it. I've been plugging away at the 3-character groups for a couple of weeks, as this was holding up my progression, and thankfully it is starting to resolve.

I disagree with oc.

When you try to do the lessons speed as defined on this website20/10 the chances are -
look at the statistics of this site - that you will never make it, with the result of a lot of wasted time. Breaking off aroud lesson 10.

Mastering Morse code with 11 of the 41 characters 20/10 has no sense and is useless.

So you better proceed bij widening the character spacing, till you reach lesson 40. After that keep doing lesson 40, bij shortening the spacing between characters.

Do not do that till you reach 20/20, because that will take an enormous amount of time. So the in this forum published advice is to lower 20 and increase 5 when you finish lesson 40 with 20/5, such that the throughput (number of characters in one minute is constant.

You will finish with 10/10 or so, perfect Morse code, not that wide spacing intermediate step, that a c t u a l l y i s n o t m o r s e c o d e a n d i s h a r d a n d a w f u l l t o d e c o d e a n d t o t r a n s m i t f o r e x p e r i e n c e d o p e r a t o r s.

OK, maybe you don't fully comprehend how long this can take, so let me admit to you all that I am currently working on lesson 40. It has taken me a full year, practicing half an hour in the morning and half an hour a night every single day. For some it may come much easier, but for me it required an insane amount of repetition. Lucky for me once I decide to do something, I rarely give up. I still make mistakes, and some days are better than others, but dedication is what it takes.

I found shortening the group length to 3 and lengthening the pause between groups helped a lot. I can hold 3 chars in my head long enough to type them. At 20 wpm I don't think I am counting dots and dashes.

good idea