VCF Europa Update

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Wed Mar 8 21:55:16 2000

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 11:21:49AM +1030, Geoff Roberts wrote:
> Interestingly, although he was a full call ham, he was a vigourous
> opponent of morse being compulsory at speeds > 5wpm, as he said, based
> on his experience, that some people simply
> CANNOT learn it much beyond that level, no matter how hard they try. I
> can believe that, I tried for YEARS to get up to 10wpm for my Full
> license, but can't seem to quite get there.

I've certainly heard people say that there's a real barrier between about
7 WPM and about 10 WPM. Sure fits my experience. As I said, at the
lower speeds it just felt like a table lookup -- sometimes I found myself
even picturing the actual piece of paper that I'd written my chart on.
But after an infinite amount of practice it gets easier above that speed,
the letters gradually pop into your head when you hear the Morse. Not to say
that it isn't still really hard to get your speed up further, I sure failed
the 20 WPM test the first 3 or 4 times, it got pretty depressing.

I think foreign languages are the same. When you start out it's really
hard work trying to formulate sentences, and trying to decode the ones you
hear before you get a receiver overrun (how do translators on TV do it?!).
But after a really ridiculous amount of practice it sort of changes, the
"vague" part of your brain gets involved and you find yourself coughing
up entire sentence fragments at a time, and on input you get a general
feeling for what a sentence means before you've even gotten it to resolve
into individual words in your mind. Not like I would know of course, I've
forgotten most of what I ever learned.

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Wed Mar 08 2000 - 21:55:16 GMT