I have only limited experience (and not near enough patience!) trying to learn CW, but I have always heard that there are two things which are actively harmful to learning: 1) trying to visualize the dots and dashes, and 2) practicing at speeds slower than encountered on the air.
The best way to learn, according to the experts, is by learning to directly associate the sound that a letter makes with that letter. This takes lots of rote memorization at first, but it trains your brain to copy code "on autopilot," which is exactly what you want for something like this.
I liken it to music: musicians who learn to play by ear take the time to learn chords, scales, and intervals. It's a slog to start with and takes hours upon hours of boring practice. But once competent, they can play most pieces of music after one or two listens with only a little "noodling" to figure out the easiest 90% of the song.
I don't _think_ I'll ever learn CW well enough to do it in a contest but I've gotten a fair amount of mileage out of https://lcwo.net/morsemachine. It's essentially the audio equivalent to flash cards.
Another word of warning is that sadly, this knowledge doesn’t seem to stick if left unexercised. Few years ago I used this website to get good enough to be able to copy callsigns from real radio. Now I would have trouble to recall more than a few letters.
As is true with nearly any language. I originally got my ham license back in 1988 when I was a kid (was actually surprised/happy I could remember my original callsign and use that to look up my registration date). I got up to the 13 WPM needed to pass the General license back then, but then I eventually lost interest, especially when I went to college and the Internet (and especially the Web) was in its early stages. I sadly can hardly remember any of the codes these days.
It'd be interesting to see how quickly relearning it to ~the same level would be in terms of % of time spent originally.
I found something similar after going through several different keyboard layouts ~15 years ago. It turned out it only took a few hours for it to all come back so I make sure to use Qwerty and Dvorak at least once a year in case I ever need them (I landed on a 3rd).
The best way to learn, according to the experts, is by learning to directly associate the sound that a letter makes with that letter. This takes lots of rote memorization at first, but it trains your brain to copy code "on autopilot," which is exactly what you want for something like this.
I liken it to music: musicians who learn to play by ear take the time to learn chords, scales, and intervals. It's a slog to start with and takes hours upon hours of boring practice. But once competent, they can play most pieces of music after one or two listens with only a little "noodling" to figure out the easiest 90% of the song.
I don't _think_ I'll ever learn CW well enough to do it in a contest but I've gotten a fair amount of mileage out of https://lcwo.net/morsemachine. It's essentially the audio equivalent to flash cards.