Four ways to practise without it feeling like practice
These are not a substitute for the course. They exist because some days a lesson feels like homework, and fifteen minutes of a game you want to beat is worth considerably more than fifteen minutes of a drill you are avoiding. All four record to the same statistics as everything else on the site.
Character blitz
Sixty seconds, one character at a time, as many as you can take. It is the closest thing here to a warm-up: no context, no words, nothing to guess from, just raw recognition speed. Good for finding out whether a character you think you know is actually automatic yet — under time pressure the ones you are still working out reveal themselves immediately.
Speed ladder
Every correct answer speeds it up, three mistakes and you are out. This one has a specific use: it finds your ceiling. Most people badly misjudge how fast they can copy, usually low, because they practise at a comfortable speed and never test the edge. The ladder puts a number on it, and the number is usually higher than expected.
Word rush
Hear a word, pick it out of four. The point is to stop spelling. If you are copying letter by letter and assembling words afterwards, this is uncomfortable at first — you are being asked to recognise the shape of a whole word rather than reconstruct it. That is the transition from copying to reading, and it is the single biggest speed gain available to most learners.
Pile-up
Three stations calling at once. Pull out as many callsigns as you can. This is the only game here that resembles a real situation rather than an exercise: on a live band, several people answering a call at the same time is normal, and picking one out of the noise is a distinct skill from copying a clean signal. Frustrating, and closer to the real thing than anything else on the site apart from the band.
Everything here feeds your statistics, so a session spent playing still tells you which characters are costing you. If you have not started yet, the course is the place to begin — games are much more fun once you know a dozen characters.