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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

If you want to learn Morse it is a lot easier if you don't try to learn it in alphabetical order. Instead you should learn it in order of the lengths of the signals, which corresponds roughly to the frequency order of the letters in English, i.e. learn the one-beep-long letters first (E, T), then the two-beep-long letters (A, N, I. M), then the three-beep-long letters, etc.

E . T -

I .. A .- N -. M --

S ... U ..- R .-. D -..

H .... B -... L .-.. F ..-. V ...-

W .-- K -.- G --. O ---

Z --.. C -.-. X -..- P .--.

J .--- Y -.-- Q --.-

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The key factor is to learn the sound of each letter at speed, rather than counting dots and dashes. If you're to use Morse with any degree of fluency, you need to instinctively recognise the sound "dah-dit-dah-dit" as C, rather than counting "dash, dot, dash, dot" or mentally scanning through T, N, K and then C. It's helpful to think of Morse as a kind of music rather than a coding system.

Most successful learners use the Koch method, which transmits characters at 20wpm equivalent speed but with longer gaps between each character. You start by learning to distinguish two similar letters (A and N or K and R), then adding letters one by one. Learning at slower speeds or using a visual letter chart is actively harmful - it encourages you to count dots and dashes rather than listening to the sound of each letter as a complete rhythmic pattern. The order in which you learn the letters is largely unimportant.

https://lcwo.net/

This method disconnects it from your normal language processing. Start by learning simple words so you associate it with your language. You'll be at 20wpm no time.

So much this. Morse code is not a language of symbolic translation. You need to hear entire words.

I was taught that you should learn at speed (~20wpm) with 2 characters and build from there.

Looking in to it, I see there's two ways - Farnsworth & Koch. The downside of the former is that you get stuck with slow speed and have a harder time to get faster. The downside of the latter is that the initial learning process seems more pointless because there's no actual words.

I found this site useful for practice: http://aa9pw.com/morsecode

A newbie question - What is the reason E and T have one beep only?

Efficiency of transmission. Having shorter codes for more frequent letters reduces the average length of the encoding.

Huffman coding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding

From wikipedia on Morse code:

> In his earliest code, Morse had planned to transmit only numerals, and to use a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by Alfred Vail in 1840 to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail estimated the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown. //

M [1] is always well down the frequency in general lists. I wonder if Vail's corpus was biased, whether he discounted local names.

Interesting to note that Morse planned a code using a dictionary; should we be calling it Vail code?

[1] http://letterfrequency.org/

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