How to learn Morse code

Learn the sound, not the chart

Most people start with a chart, and it is the slow way in. On paper, A is a dot and a dash. Heard at a normal speed, A is one short sound with a lift at the end, di-dah, and it is over before you could count anything.

Learn A as a picture of a dot and a dash, and every letter you hear has to be translated twice: sound to picture, then picture to letter. That middle step is what caps your speed. So say the characters out loud as sounds (dit and dah, not dot and dash), and listen from day one.

A chart still has its place. The printable Morse code chart is right for writing Morse down or reading it slowly off paper. Just keep it face down while you listen.

The Koch method

Ludwig Koch, a German psychologist, worked out this way of learning in the 1930s. Start with only two characters, sent at full speed. Listen to random groups of them and write down what you hear. When you copy 90% correctly, add a third character, and keep going one at a time until you have them all.

The first session feels hard. Two characters at full speed is a lot of sound to sort, and you will miss plenty. But from that first session you are recognizing sounds rather than counting them, and since each lesson only uses characters you already know, you are never more than one new sound away from a clean copy.

The trainer starts with K and M and follows the order LCWO.net uses: 40 lessons covering the letters, the numbers and the five punctuation marks most used on the air.

Farnsworth spacing: fast letters, slow gaps

Full-speed characters leave you no time to think between them. Farnsworth spacing fixes that. Each character is still sent at full speed, so it keeps its real rhythm, but the silence between characters and between words is stretched. The method is named for Donald R. Farnsworth, the radio amateur who made it popular.

A good start is 18 words a minute for the characters and 8 words a minute overall. Those are the starting speeds in the trainer and in our app. As copying gets easy, raise the overall speed a little at a time toward the character speed, until the gaps are standard.

Resist the urge to slow the characters down when it gets hard. Slow characters can be counted, and counting is the habit you are trying not to build. Slow the gaps instead.

A routine you can keep

Short and often beats long and rare. Ten to fifteen minutes most days is plenty, and far easier to keep up than an hour on the weekend.

1. Run one or two sessions of 50 characters at your current lesson.
2. At 90% or better, move on. Below that, stay. Sitting on one lesson for several days is normal.
3. Watch the characters you miss. The trainer marks them in red and sends them more often, so the weak ones get the most practice.
4. When two characters keep getting mixed up, tap them one after the other on the trainer's buttons until you can hear the difference.

Writing it down, then copying in your head

At first, write or type every character the moment you hear it. If you miss one, leave a gap and keep going. Stopping to work out a miss tends to cost you the next character or two as well.

Later, once you know every character, comes head copy: hearing whole words without writing each letter, the way you follow someone talking. That comes from listening to real words rather than random groups. Short common words are the place to start, like THE, AND and YOU. Paste any sentence into the Morse code translator and it will play it at the speed you set.

Where people get stuck

• Look-alike sounds. S, H and 5 are three, four and five dits. B and 6 differ by one dit at the end. Hear them back to back until the count turns into a feel.
• Counting creeps back. If you catch yourself counting dits, the character speed is too low. Raise it, even though the next day or two will feel worse.
• A lesson that won't pass. Keep going at the same lesson. Dropping back a lesson or two for a session can help when the scores slide.
• All the characters, no speed. Once the last lesson passes, the work moves to real text: words, then sentences, with the overall speed creeping up toward the character speed.

What comes next

On the air, Morse is called CW, and many ham radio operators use it because it gets through on very little power and simple gear. In the US, Morse has not been part of the amateur license exams since 2007, so you can get a license without it, and plenty of people learn it afterward for the fun of it. A local radio club is the place to ask about practice on the air.

Off the air, Morse is a handy party trick, a flashlight game and a puzzle code. For practice on your phone, Covert Mail, our app, teaches Morse the same way, by ear in the Koch order, and also teaches the classic ciphers. For kids, the secret codes guide starts with simpler codes and works up to Morse.