Morse Code

✍️ Type and listen

▶ Play ■ Stop Copy the dots and dashes

🎧 The course

Seventeen short lessons, two new characters at a time. In each one: learn the new sounds, copy them by ear (aim for 90 percent), hear whole words made from what you know, and practice sending. Ten or fifteen minutes a day works better than an hour once a week. A ✓ marks lessons you’ve copied at 90 percent; it stays on this device.

📋 Every character

Tap any one to hear it. The sound words (di, dit, dah) are how operators say Morse out loud: learn the rhythm, not the picture.

📖 How Morse works

• Timing is everything. A dah lasts three times as long as a dit. The gap inside a letter is one dit long, the gap between letters is three, and the gap between words is seven. Speed is measured in words per minute, timed with the word PARIS.
• Learn by ear. The ARRL’s advice is to learn each character as a sound and never to write dots and dashes. Charts are handy to look things up, but learning the sounds means you won’t have to translate in your head.
• Full speed, extra space. Hearing letters at a real speed with long gaps between them (the Farnsworth method) teaches the rhythm of each letter from the start; you speed up by closing the gaps.
• Not just sound. The same code works with a flashlight, a whistle, a mirror in the sun, or taps on a wall. Flip on Flash a light above to practice by sight.
• Two Morse codes. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail’s original American Morse code was used on telegraph wires in the United States. The International Morse code taught here became the world standard for radio, and it is still used by ham radio operators.

Sources: ITU-R M.1677-1, International Morse code · ARRL: Tips for learning Morse code · Farnsworth timing. Want to keep going? Licensed amateur radio operators still send Morse every day; the ARRL has more on getting started.