Choosing what to copy
The library runs from single characters up to whole formal messages, and the decks are graded L1 to L5 so you can filter to roughly the right difficulty. There is also an "only characters I have learned" switch, which hides anything using letters your course has not unlocked yet — useful early, and worth turning off once you have most of the alphabet, because waiting until you know every character before copying real words is a good way to stay bored.
A progression that works:
- Single characters, then the confusable pairs. Six letters are each other backwards and they cause most early mistakes.
- Three- and four-letter words. The first point at which morse stops being a test and starts being reading.
- The hundred commonest words. Copy these reliably and you have roughly half of ordinary English.
- Callsigns, Q codes and abbreviations. The vocabulary of an actual contact, and unforgiving because there is no context to guess from.
- Code groups. Five random characters, no meaning, nothing to guess at. The honest test of whether you can really copy.
Type along, or copy and check
Type along keeps the audio running and marks every keystroke the moment it lands. It is the right mode for most practice: the pressure is continuous, and the lag meter shows how far behind the sending you are sitting.
Copy and check plays the whole thing first and asks you to write it out afterwards. It is considerably harder, because now you have to hold the message rather than react to it — which is exactly what real operators do, and the reason it is worth attempting even when it feels impossible.
Falling behind is correct
The lag meter is not a warning. Good operators sit two or three characters behind the sending and stay there — writing down a character they heard a moment ago while listening to the next one. It feels wrong and it is right.
The alternative, trying to type each character as it sounds, means every hesitation costs you the character that arrived during it. Running deliberately behind gives you a buffer, and the buffer is what absorbs a moment's doubt without losing anything.
The wall at ten to fifteen words a minute
Nearly everybody stops here for a while, and it is almost always the same cause: you are still translating. The characters have become familiar but there is a step left in the middle — hear the sound, recall the letter, write it down — and around twelve words a minute they start arriving faster than that step can run.
Two things that get people through:
- Raise the character speed, not the overall speed. If your characters are at 15 wpm, put them to 20 and drop the overall speed to compensate. Faster characters are harder to count and easier to recognise, which is the entire point.
- Stop writing for a while. Copy short words in your head and only write the word down at the end. It feels like a step backwards for about a week, and then it is not.
What does not work is grinding at the same speed for longer. The wall is not made of practice hours.
Everything here is generated
No exercise on this page is a recording. Each one is text, and the audio is synthesised at whatever speed, pitch and spacing you have set — which is why you can copy the same message at 8 words a minute today and 18 next month, and why any of them can be saved as a .wav to take with you.
Not started yet? The course introduces characters one at a time. Copying a whole message without stopping is the mill. And your statistics will tell you which characters are actually costing you, rather than which ones feel hard.