Contrary to what some might say, there should be nothing at all
gratifying, or pleasurable about the actual learning of Morse
code. It should always be a mentally fatiguing workout,
with all gratification left to the results. Simply put, if
you start to get good at copying and sending words at a certain
speed, this only indicates that you are not pushing yourself
hard enough and that's how you hit a learning plateau.
Notice that I use the word "plateau" and not barrier. With
the exception of head copying in CW, there is no barrier to be
encountered except for your practical ability to write.
The best way to describe the actual learning process of Morse is
by comparing it to working out with weights. When most
people work out with weights for the first time, after the
initial soreness is gone, they are surprised at how quickly they
are able to add more weight to each exercise and how rapidly
their strength seems to increase over months. Then, all of
a sudden this increase in strength seems to slow and adding yet
more weight to their exercises starts to become exponentially
difficult. There is never really a barrier because, with
time and greater effort, more weight can always be incrementally
added, but never at the same rate as in the beginning.
CW is much like weight lifting for your brain. When you
start out, graduating from 5 to 10 words per minute can be done
relatively quickly. But with each increase in speed, the
required practice time will need to increase. It may
perhaps be safe to say that going from 16 to 17 words per minute
will require three times the amount of practice time that it
takes to get from 9 to 10
words per minute. But now, I'm just throwing numbers out there,
just to give you an idea of what to expect. In terms of
effort spent, it's not a linear function. However, if you
stick to pen copying and the Farsworth method, you will not
notice any particular point between, lets say, 10 and 20 words
per minute where your progress is suddenly arrested.
It simply takes more practice time from one wpm speed to the
next.
In the beginning, when you are still using your keyboard you
should take blocks of text of the same size and see how accurately you can pump them out.
The graduation score is 90%, after which time you need to increase your speed. And when I
say 90%, I don't mean 90%
most of the time, or 90% with two out of three tries. What I
mean is that if you ever hit 90% on any try, using any
consistent text block size of the exercise, you need to say goodbye to that speed
and move up immediately, without trying it again just to see if
you can do it twice.
Once you move up a notch, you will naturally see a drop in
performance with scores around 70%. Then, you may notice that as
you work your way back up to around 85% with this new speed, you
can't seem to get any better. What then?
There is something about the learning of Morse
code which doesn't appreciate either the perfectionist or the
slacker. It seems that in this particular learning process,
biting off more than you can chew is the only way forward. Therefore, quite often the solution to hitting a learning plateau is to actually set your
character (right
figure) speed a point or two higher and see if this will force you off
the plateau. When you set the character speed higher,
although the individual characters are being sent faster, the
space between the characters is also increasing. More
often than not, this increased articulation of the characters is
what you need to step up to a higher wpm speed. Try
this for a while and then and see
if you can score a 90%.
Once you get yourself off the keyboard and start copying with pen and paper,
there's no way of getting a score from JLMC. In this case, you
must use your own judgment. If you are getting most of the words
in a block, it's time to bump up the speed until you are once
again struggling and fumbling.
The exercise sked below will help you keep track of
the blocks of text that you use from one session to the next and the
speed at which you are practicing them.
The two exercises that you may not recognize here are Sending
Book and Newspaper Article. Sending Book is the book that
you choose to practice sending. As previously explained,
it involves reading a sentence from the book and sending it in
Morse code without looking. Newspaper Article involves
cutting and pasting something (such as a newspaper article) to
the JLMC source window in order to give you first-hand
experience in copying real sentences rather than random words.
This is only an example of what an exercise schedule might look like. You will most definitely want to change it around a bit when you decide which exercises you want to work with and the speeds you want to
set. So copy and paste it into your
favorite word processor and customize it to your liking.
1.
Sending Book -
PAGE: ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ _______ ______
2.
CW Primer - Random punctuation - 24 by 28
_______ _____ _____ _____ ______ _____ ______
3.
Ex. #14 - Words mixed with #s, punctuation and periods - 31 by 34
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
4.
Ex. #9 - Single words with period - 35 by 37
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
5.
Ex. #8 - Single Words – 32 by 35
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
6. Newspaper article - 29 by 32
______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
7. Ex. #11 – Words starting and ending with punctuation - 27 by 30
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
8. Ex .#6 – Words broken with numbers, punctuation, and troublesome
letters 28 by 31
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
9. Ex .#3 - Words with numbers – no spaces - 28 by 31
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
10. Ex. #12 - Scrambled words with numbers – no spaces- 27 by 32
PART: _____ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______
11. CW Primer - Abbreviations - 32 by 35
______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______