Learning CW: goals and methods

Where I am

I've been wanting to learn CW (morse code) for nearly a year now, and I've made some efforts in that direction but haven't gotten very far. There are a ton of great resources out there, including clubs and classes, and I've tried to take advantage of the ones that would work for me. This has looked like me trying to follow the curriculum of some popular courses without actually investing the time in the classroom portion of the course. It has been okay: I know the letters and digits okay and can recognize some easily, some less-easily.

I can't, however, really string them together into much very quickly at all. When I do word groups training on Learn CW Online I'm consistently at around 70 - 80% correct when set to words from 2-6 characters and a speed of 30 wpm with a letter-spacing of 6 wpm. I've felt a bit stagnant and am not seeing my self get over that hump the way I would like.

An ambitious goal

'I wonder if I could get the ARRL Code Proficiency for 15 WPM by the end of the year...' That thought came to me yesterday while I was trying to pick out parts of a POTA exchange on air. Seems very ambitious, but also maybe nearly doable? Let's try it. The worst that could happen is that I don't get it!

How

This part has really been tripping me up. I'm sure the curricula online that I've looked at are good -- they have been shaped and tweaked over multiple iterations of the courses -- but they aren't really designed for where I am. I'm not in the class. I'm not getting the feedback. And as we know with systems, you can't just pull one part out and expect it to function exactly the same way. So I'd like to try something new (to me). I expect I'll need to keep tweaking and evolving what I'm doing over the next 3 months. Hopefully because I'm improving and need a new technique to bump to the next level. But also possibly because my approach is bad and needs a change.

My short-term goals are two:

Get more comfortable with some of the letters that I know slow me down.

Get more comfortable hearing words.

I have a list of letters that give me difficulty, so I'm using that to work on the first goal. My shortest-term goal there is to

Be able to comfortably achieve 90% accuracy on a 2 minute word training session with words of 2-7 character length using the letters P and D at a setting of 30/18 (30 wpm character speed, 18 wpm spacing).

The thinking here is that by getting to where I can comfortably go substantially faster than my goal with these hard letters that I'll be 'extra' fluent with those and they'll no longer get in my way.

For the second goal, I don't quite know how to quantify the immediate goal. My tactic is going to be listening to the 500 beginner words on the morsecode.world Word List Trainer page at 30/10. I'm not necessarily going to guess them: just listen to the code, the spoken word, then the code again on repeat for all the words. Let's see if things start to get more familiar that way?

Will this work?

No clue. But like I said, it can't hurt to try!