What the Koch method is, and why this course uses it
Lesson one has two characters in it: K and M. They arrive at full speed, mixed at random, and you type what you hear. When you can copy ninety per cent of them, lesson two adds a third character. That repeats until all forty are in, and the speed never drops at any point.
That is the whole method, and it is deliberately the opposite of how most people are taught.
Who Koch was
Ludwig Koch was a German engineer, born in Kassel in 1901, who took a Dr.-Ing. at the technical university in Braunschweig. His work on morse training was published in the Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde in February 1936. The figure usually quoted from it is that he brought a class to twelve words a minute in under fourteen hours of instruction — a result nobody using the conventional approach came close to.
Treat the exact number with some caution; it is repeated far more often than it is checked, and the original is a ninety-year-old German paper. But the principle underneath it has been rediscovered by every serious morse teacher since, and it is not in dispute.
Why full speed from the very first minute
The conventional approach starts slowly and speeds up. It feels sensible and it fails, for a specific and well-understood reason: at slow speeds you have time to count. You hear dah-di-dah, you count three elements, you recall that dash-dot-dash is K, and you write it down. That works beautifully at five words a minute and is a dead end, because you have not learned the letter K — you have learned a decoding procedure, and the procedure collapses at about ten words a minute when the characters start arriving faster than you can run it.
Then you have to unlearn it, which takes longer than learning it properly would have.
Sent at twenty words a minute a K is over in a third of a second. There is no time to count, so you never build the habit. What you build instead is recognition of a sound — the same faculty that lets you know a word without spelling it, or a friend's voice before they say their name. Slow is not easier. Slow is a different and worse skill.
Farnsworth spacing — the part everybody finds confusing
If characters must be fast, how does a beginner cope at all? By stretching the silence instead. This is Farnsworth spacing, and it is why this site shows you two speeds rather than one:
- Character speed — how fast each individual letter is sent. Keep this high. The default here is 20 wpm and there is rarely a good reason to go below 18.
- Overall speed — how fast the message arrives as a whole, once the gaps between characters have been stretched. Start around 10 wpm and raise it as you improve.
So at 20/10 the letters fly past at their true shape, and you get roughly twice as long between them to write one down and get ready for the next. Every character you learn is learned at the speed you will eventually need. Nothing has to be relearned later — you close the gaps, and the gaps are the only thing that changes.
The arithmetic is the ARRL standard: total gap time is 60 ÷ overall − 37.2 ÷ character seconds, spread across the nineteen units of spacing in an average word. That is why raising your overall speed by two feels like a real step and raising character speed by two feels like falling off a cliff.
Why that order of characters
The sequence is K M R S U A P T L O W I and on through to X. It is not alphabetical and it is not frequency order, both of which would be worse. It is arranged so the first characters you meet sound as different from each other as possible — K is dah-di-dah and M is dah-dah, which no ear confuses — and so that genuinely confusable pairs arrive spread far apart rather than together.
It also front-loads letters that make real words early, which matters more than it sounds: copying SUM or MARK is a different experience from copying random letters, and the difference shows up in whether people keep going.
Ninety per cent, not a hundred
The threshold to advance is ninety per cent, and it is worth understanding why it is not higher. Waiting for perfection on two characters means drilling something you have already learned, while the thing that actually improves — hearing a new sound among familiar ones — does not happen. Ninety per cent means you know them. The last ten per cent arrives on its own while you are busy with lesson four.
Equally, do not push past a lesson you are copying at sixty per cent. The method only works if each character is genuinely automatic before the next arrives.
How long this actually takes
Fifteen to twenty minutes a day, most days. Expect several weeks to get through the letters and a few more for the numbers and punctuation, which are longer and less forgiving. Some lessons take one sitting and some take a week, and where the wall lands is different for everybody.
Two things that reliably help when you stall: drop the overall speed by two words a minute and leave the character speed alone, and stop trying to catch the character you just missed. Chasing a lost letter costs you the next three. Let it go, keep copying, and you will be surprised how much of the message you still get.
Everything here is stored in your own browser — no account, nothing uploaded, and your statistics show which characters are costing you and which pairs you confuse. When the course starts feeling comfortable, the practice library has real words, callsigns and whole contacts to copy.