Morse code practice

A trainer that adds characters as you earn them, in the order that is hardest to confuse with what you already know. Hear a group and type it, key a character on the space bar and have it read back, or drill flashcards. Scored per character, saved on your device.

How to use it

Start in Copy. Press Play, listen, type what you heard, press Check. The group is drawn from the characters you are learning; at first that is K and M, so the groups are short and the answers are obvious, by design. When both are reliable the trainer adds a third, and the groups get longer as the set grows.

The character speed is the speed the letters are sent at, and it should be high: eighteen to twenty words a minute, fast enough that a character is a shape and not a count. The gaps between characters are stretched automatically so you have time to write each one down. As you improve, the gaps are what shrink. The letters never slow down, because you never want to hear a slow letter.

What the score means

Each character carries its own accuracy, shown above the trainer. A new character is added when every current one is at ninety per cent over at least ten attempts. If the set stops growing, look at which character is lowest: that is the one holding the rest back, and it is usually one half of a mirror pair or one step in the dot-run. Drill it against its neighbours on the alphabet page and come back.

Copy scoring aligns what you typed against what was sent before counting, so one dropped character does not score the whole group as wrong. A learner who misses one letter in five gets eighty per cent, not zero, because eighty per cent is what happened.

Sending

Switch to Send, and the trainer shows a character. Key it on the space bar: hold for a dash, tap for a dot. Press Check, and it reads back what you sent. The reading uses the same decoder as the reader page, with one difference: the dit length is fixed by the keying speed, six words a minute by default and separate from the listening speed, so it judges the shape and not the tempo. Sending the right shape slowly is right. Sending a dash too short so that it reads as a dot is the error it will catch.

When you plateau

Around the tenth character, most people stall. The easy distinctions are done and what is left are the pairs that differ by one element or by order. This is normal and it passes. Two things help: shorter sessions, because a tired ear counts, and switching to Send for a few minutes, because keying a character fixes its rhythm in a way hearing it does not. The learning page has the method in full.

Frequently asked

Where is my progress saved?

In this browser, on this device, and nowhere else. There are no accounts and nothing is sent to a server. Clearing the browser data clears the progress; so does the Start over button. If you practise on two devices, they do not know about each other.

When does it add a new character?

When every character you are currently learning has been sent at least ten times and you have got it right at least ninety per cent of the time. One lucky round is not mastery, and a weak character holds the whole set back: that is deliberate, because the next character is chosen to be hard to confuse with the ones you already have, and that only works if you actually have them.

Why does it start with K and M?

Because they share no structure: one is long-short-long, the other is two longs. You can tell them apart on the first hearing without counting anything, which is how the Koch method makes sure the counting habit never forms. Every character after that is picked to be the least confusable with what you already know.

What does the space bar do in Send mode?

It is your key. Tap it for a dot, hold it about three times longer for a dash, and pause between characters. The trainer reads what you keyed against a keying speed of its own, six words a minute by default, so a dot is 200 milliseconds and a key held past 400 is a dash; the listening speed stays separate. A beginner’s hand is slow, and that is fine: the shape is judged, and the tempo is yours to raise on the slider.

Copy, Send or Flashcards: which should I use?

Copy is the skill that takes time and should get most of your minutes. Send fixes rhythms in the hand and is worth five minutes at the end. Flashcards are for the first day with a new character, when you want to see the code and say the letter before you try to hear it.