Words From Fabian DJ1YFK About Morse
Like you, I have heard and read about this often (copying whole words rather than single letters), and I think it is a little bit misleading. I can easily copy plain text CW in German or English at around 80 WpM, but still, if I actively, consciously listen, I *do* hear every single letter. But that does not mean that I have to concatenate those letters to form a word, like a first grade pupil does, when he reads an unknown word (I also recently encountered this problem again while learning Macedonian, written in cyrillic letters!). I rather make an assumption on what the word could be, often even before the word is transmitted. By making such predictions (and in most sentences you can easily predict the following word; or if not, you can predict the word based on the first letter, or make some rough assumptions of what might come next), you can stop to worry about the word after you have recognized the start. If, however, an unexpected word appears, you have to change the plan in your mind, and decode it consciously. In most cases again, the first two or three letters will be sufficient to make a safe assumption on what the word will be. In cases of unknown names (operator, QTH, ...) you might have to go back to putting it together letter by letter. I think everyone copies plain text CW similar to this, to a certain degree. It starts with your first standard QSOs: Those ever repeating phrases ('tnx fr rprt = ur rst 599 ='...) are soon 'hard coded' into your brain. They are so easy to copy because it's what you *expect* to hear. If the other station suddenly starts sending something _unexpected_, you're getting into trouble or at least you'll suddenly have to pay close attention. The reception is moving somewhere from your subconsciousness to a higher level of consciousness. After my first 50 CW QSOs, I stopped to write down every single letter, and only had to write everything that was not the expected stuff like "my name is", but the names/QTHs itself. So, hearing a whole word as one 'sound' does - in my personal experience - not work, you still hear it letter by letter. But the more routined you are, the deeper the process of perception slides into your subconsciousness. 73, -- Fabian Kurz, DJ1YFK * Dresden, Germany * http://fkurz.net/
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