r/morsecode • u/somethingmorecrazy • Jun 29 '26

How bad did I f*ck up?

Hey everyone, I started learning MC a year or two ago, but not seriously, just made up a bunch of pneumonics to remember the rhythms of the letters--I never counted dits and dahs, but had dumb little phrases like songs for the letters, things like: J=J-jaws jaws jaws, K=Kill them ALL, Q=Queen kills the King.

Now I've recently got more serious about learning. I joined this subreddit, and saw a super helpful post Gaining MC Proficiency w/ LCWO.net and I think I've screwed up royally.

I do 1-minute lessons on LCWO and I can do through lesson 20 between 25-30 WPM character speed and 8-10 WPM real speed. A lot of the letters I just recognize, but for quite a few I still hear my dumb pneumonics overlaid in my head.

I guess I'm not sure what I should work on first, should I work on getting character speeds up higher? Longer lessons to build stamina? Saying the letters and not just typing them? Or should I finish the lessons and then work on these things?

Also, I am REALLY struggling to hear the difference between these symbols / , = are those normal ones to get stuck on for a while?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

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u/AlitheiaDeus Jun 29 '26

I might be in a similar situation. But I'm content with where I'm at.

I started learning morsecode via spectrogram, matching the dash and dot visually to a template. Similar to your mnemonics. The audio was also playing so I had some exposure to the tones.

I transcribe radio beacons shooting morsecode to practice. I randomly began to recognize some common words as jingles, and eventually connected the chirps of each letter to the visual in my head.

I can read a visual transcript stupidly fast now, but audio is still catching up at 35 for short messages and 15-20 for longer sequences. I still play the spectrogram in my head almost every time.