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LCWO Discussion Forum [Atom LCWO Forum Feed]

This is a simple discussion forum for LCWO users. Feel free to use it for any kind of discussion related to this website.

Thread: Struggeling and learning curve

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AuthorText


Posted: 2013-03-10 17:02
Is it normal while learning a new character, every previous character become hard to identify - ad everything seem to mix up. When this happen, should I then take a step back, or should I continue with the same lesson whith the new character until my brain manage to identify all characters correct? Regards, Marcus.


Posted: 2013-03-11 18:21
Yep it's normal - my advice would be to keep going forward & learning the new character.


Posted: 2013-03-12 17:47
Yes, for me it was/is the same. Especialy as you move forward and it's become more and more characters. Progress becomes sometimes signicantly slower.

But don't worry, go on... i got a huge improvement when i identified which characters i was mixing up and then insertes 1-2 days a lesson especialy with only these 2-4 critical characters. After that return to the whole set and you will see that it will go better.

Also remind you to remember not the dit's and da's, but only the sound. That helped me a lot, because i cought myself that i started to count dit's and da's to differenciate the letters. This way it will not work with higher speeds and you will loose the next characters.

Hope i could help with my experiences.

Which lection you are now?


Posted: 2013-03-13 23:33
I agree that you should keep going - and use both the "Lessons" and "MorseMachine"; they add new characters in the same order. It is good to learn with the character speed quite fast (maybe 15wpm or more), so you hear the rhythm more than the individual dots and dashes.


Posted: 2013-03-20 09:52
I agree with mrx69
I was having trouble with Q,Y,F & L and falling into the trap of "counting dots" so I spent a couple of days just learning the sound of those letters so they are now as obvious to me as K !!
Also turn the character speed up and the spacing down - I have 26wpm characters and 2wpm spacing.
keep going - it gets better !!


Posted: 2013-04-27 06:05
if you hear a letter and write it down what you think it is how do you find out if your right or wrong and how do you correct they way you hear something. first time user and confused


Posted: 2013-04-27 06:07
the first letter to learn was K and I hear dash and two dots. I can't tell the difference between the dash and dots. how do I fix that curve?


Posted: 2013-04-27 13:49
Simply by not counting the dashes and dots. Just learn the "music" of it. That's why it is recommended to use at least a character speed of 20wpm or higher, so the dashes and dots melt together into a characteristic sound.


Posted: 2013-04-28 13:46
Hi John, the first letterS you learn is K and M. The first lessons are just 2 or 3 letters, and by learning to hear the difference between the letters, you trick your mind into not counting dits and dahs. Focus on recognizing the whole letter, don't worry about dits and dahs. Keep at it, it will come (and go, and come again ;-) ) to you.

Greetings from that guy struggling to get past lesson 29.


Posted: 2013-05-17 01:49
Hi all!

Is there a way to view the progress and the stats of other users on this site?

I don't want to race or do any competition...

I just want to see if others went throught the same difficulties to increase to a lesson to another as me. I would feel more encouraged to see that other than me was as bad as me after lower lessons and finally get through.

Man... I need encouragement!

Thanks.



Posted: 2013-05-17 17:53
You might be able to get some individuals to reveal their scores, but I don't think there is any easy way to extract the stats for other users. I'm not sure there's any much value in doing so anyway. They're only as accurate as the individual cares to let them be. Attempts can be deleted, lessons skipped, or folk can delete their entire account and then create a new ones.

Descriibe your progress so far, and I'm sure a bunch of folk will chip in. It may be encouraging, or not, depending...


Posted: 2013-05-17 18:19
When I was going through the lessons on this site, I generally just checked my scores if I thought there was a chance I got above 90% - so there's not much record of the frustrations I had.

I have a few notepads around from the learning process... it's nice to look back sometimes.

All I can say is, in my experience, you can read everything, you can listen to other peoples opinions - but the only way you ever improve at copying CW is by practice practice practice.

There were days when I was incredibly frustrated - that I could never get over whatever character was causing me trouble. Some days I seemed to actually go backwards.

It was depressing.

But - I didn't give up, I kept at it.

If you keep at it, you'll crack it too.

Don't let the frustrations make you stop: keep telling yourself - if I stick at this, I'll get it.


Posted: 2013-05-17 19:25
Today i started to use this program to learn all about cw.
I am at lesson 2 :)and have to admit that it is not easy.
Average speed is 16 wpm at the moment, and i have to repeat each lesson saveral times untill is think i understand it.
But when i look at my score, it is between 97 and 100% :)
I am happy with that, it gives me the spirit to go on.


Posted: 2013-05-18 13:17
I've been doing this a solid half hour a day for two weeks now, and I can't get past Lesson 3. I catch myself thinking about each dit/dah, and I can not get to the level of just hearing the "music of it".

Is it possible that some people are just incapable of getting it. That's the way I'm feeling.


Posted: 2013-05-18 16:19
Richard, what letter/spacing speed are you using?


Posted: 2013-05-18 16:32
Richard, i started just a few days ago, and thought i could manage with a speed of 16 wpm.
This turned out to be to fast for me.
Now i got the speed back from 16 wpm to 8 wpm.
i can follow the lessons now with no errors.
So maybe it is an idea for you to put the speed back?


Posted: 2013-05-18 21:07
Hi David and Leon, I'm using:
Character Speed = 20 wpm, Effective Speed = 10 wpm

If I slow down the effective speed to 5 or 6, I can do it. But only by thinking about the dits and dahs. After reading about this method, that's exactly what I'm afraid will happen and I'll never learn right. I really want to learn from the sound.

What do you think? Am I approaching this right, or should I slow down?


Posted: 2013-05-18 23:02
You're putting in the effort and not getting the results you deserve - so I'd suggest slowing down.

I used 15 wpm character speed & 12 wpm effective speed when I started here.

The main thing is to try and keep the character speed above 12/13 wpm - so you remember the sound of the character and don't count the dits.

There'll always be a part of your brain thinking about the dits & dahs, don't worry about it too much - just work on getting a reflexive response - play with the morse machine & even sound out the characters when you're trying to learn them, that helped me a lot.


Posted: 2013-05-20 00:27
KB3ZYT:
Is it possible that some people are just incapable of getting it. That's the way I'm feeling.


If you're thinking about how you do it then you'll have trouble, and if you have time to think about how you're doing it while you're doing it then you're probably going too slowly.

That said, I can break characters into dits and dahs even when the characters are sent at 30wpm, and there isn't a speed at which I can't break the characters into dits and dahs but can still hear a difference between them, so going faster didn't help me.

...and yes, the Koch "learn fast" method does not work for everyone, but it is not the only way to learn Morse, or even the best way, it's just a way. Some folk have to learn slow and build up speed later, or to learn all the characters in one go ABC-style, or to learn by listening to words rather than random characters, or...


Posted: 2013-05-20 12:38
I think that you have to find out yourszelf what is the best speed for you.
When you start at a slow speed, once you common with that, you can always put the speed up to a level wich you can follow, and bild it up from there.
And don't give up, keep on trying and trying.
Goog luck!


Posted: 2013-05-20 13:55
I think everybody is capable of doing it , some will need more time or need to put more effort into it , but if you keep at it , you will improve no matter what.

-Take enough rest between sessions and dont make your sessions too long.But do them daily.

Dont look at the big picture but take it a step at a time.

The Koch method is a proven method used in a lot
of training , have confidence.


Posted: 2013-05-20 20:55
It's like learning how to write. When you are young, you pick these things up quickly. But if you do a realistic calculation of how many hours you are holding a pen before you can fluently write a sentence, it will be way more than 100 hours I think.

So don't expect to learn morse in just 5 or 10 hours. Take your time, do daily lessons, and keep at it. I'm struggling at lesson 32 right now and progress is slow. But I'm hanging in there. I will get this. Yes I will.


Posted: 2013-05-21 11:18
I found learning Morse is a lot more like learning to read and write than learning another language. You don't learn to read and write using random characters. It really helped me when I stopped using the Koch learn-a-letter, add-a-letter random character approach. It had taken me over a year to get to lesson 12 anyway, so it clearly wasn't working for me. Instead I tried learning the whole lot at once, A,B,C fashion (using mp3s made on this site), and then on to real readable text, not random characters. Old style learning, not quick, but working for me better than Koch.


Posted: 2013-05-21 14:06
What lzlep-Rick posted really resonates with me. I think I'm done with the Koch method. I've been on the same 4 letters for a week at high speed and I'm getting nowhere. I'm slowing way down the wpm speed (20 cpm/3 wpm), and learning all of the letters. Then I'm moving on to word and phrase training to learn to read CW in context of English. Random letters are not working for me at all. Thanks for the encouragement and discussion.


Posted: 2013-05-21 15:43
After I ditched Koch I used this site to make some MP3 files. The first went "A B C" all the way to "X Y Z", then "/" (because some form of line delimiter is good) then "AA" to "AZ", and "BA" to "BZ" and so on, all the way to "ZZ", and then the other way round, "AA BA CA" etc. all the way to "ZZ". One huge long file at 16/16 or something like that. Did something similar for numbers. Did both backwards, too. I put them all on a CD in the car's CD player, and listened while driving. I can't pay attention all the time, but I can pick up where the CD's got to when I can afford the distraction again. Because the sequence is known I know what I'me going to hear next; nothing random (except when I'm finding my place again after I've missed a bit because other things required my attention). For me, the predictability was useful for learning the characters because I could learn them without writing anything down. It was also important NOT to have huge gaps, so I made the files at 16/16, not 20/10. I do wish I'd figured a good way to fit more punctuation into the sequences, though, and perhaps I should have gone for 20/20 or a bit faster...


Posted: 2013-05-22 19:55
The Koch method can be boring, especially at the beginning when you're trying to copy accurately only two or three letters. For some people the sound can become so monotonic that they cannot concentrate, become discouraged and quit at that early stage. One variation is to learn 5 characters at a time (i.e. start with 5, add another 5 and so on...). It can take longer for each lesson, but your overall progress can be faster.


Posted: 2013-05-24 13:51
Lean-some, add-some progressions all give the early characters more exposure than later characters. Instead, why not learn (say) five. Then learn another five. Then put the two sets of five together and test you know all ten. Then learn five more, and five more, and put those together as ten, and then put the two tens together as a set of twenty. Do the same for another twenty, and put the two twenties together. That way each character gets the same exposure.


Posted: 2013-10-26 05:42
lzlep, those are some really good ideas. I'm on Koch, lesson 2, thinking, man, this is going to take years. I'm reading about people in the 30's giving up. Heck, in the 30s, it should be the downhill slide, not getting exponentially harder. Sounds like a mixture of basic "Koch" to learn the rhythm of the letters, then using the Custom Code generators to learn some groups of new letters by themselves when you stagnate or just to mix some things up.

But, the best advice that I keep reading is: just keep going, a little bit each day. Consistent learning, like you are learning to read every day. Hearing the letters as music is the same as hearing the letters being spoken. You just have to learn a new sound for the letters that we all already know. Instead of it sounding like the sound for the letter "K" that we speak, you need to hear the sound of dah-di-dah.


Posted: 2013-10-26 23:37
The incremental approach is going to be a problem for some folk. The key indicator is whether or not you make sensible progress. If you get through a lesson every two or three days, keep going. If it takes a month to get through a lesson it definitely isn't working.

I found it was better to learn many characters at once than to try to learn one new character at a time. I also found it was better to learn using known sequences, words and callsigns than to learn with random character groups.

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