How I learnt Morse code in 10 minutes and why you should too
A quick method to learn an uber cool way of communication
The movies Parasite by Bong Joon Ho, Interstellar by Christopher Nolan, Tin Tin by Steven Spielberg, Independence Day by Rolan Emmerich all have something in common.
No, I’m not talking about their success in the box office, nor their super popular directors. I’m talking about the usage of Morse code in all these movies. It played a huge part in the communication that happened in some of the most crucial moments in their story.
Even though 200 years have passed since its invention, it’s still referred to and used for various methods of communication across the world.
You need not be in a situation where you have to save your family or save the world to learn morse code. It can be as simple as communicating to your best friend that you are going to ditch the next class without your classmates or teacher knowing or you want to tell your spouse that you want to leave the boring family function without making all the spying aunts suspicious, or you could use it in a situation where you want to communicate with your friends that the bully is coming to your table and even make fun of him in your own way without him knowing.
The possibilities are endless!
Are you curious to learn it and intimidated by how tough it looks? Read on and by the end of this article, you would have gained the confidence to learn one of the coolest communication methods out there.
Before we jump in, let’s learn the basics.
Morse code has two sets of characters to represent all the alphabets. Its a dot and a dash
- ‘Dot’ is represented by a period or a full stop ( . ) It is a short single-syllable sound.
- ‘Dash’ is represented by a hyphen or an underscore ( — ) This is a more prolonged sound that should sound three times longer than dots.
- Each letter is a combination of multiple dots and dashes
- Follow the flow of the sounds to know the letter that it is representing
- Each space between one letter should be approximately equal to 1 dash
- Each word between in a sentence should be approximately separated by seven dots
In its most simple sense, the Morse code will look like this. The morse code for numbers is quite straight forward. So, we’ll go ahead and find a way to memorize the alphabets
Check out this youtube video on how each of these letters sound in Morse Code
Now, since the basics are clear, let’s go with how we can memorize it in the easiest way
After scouring across the internet, I came across a video by Nelson Dellis where I found the easiest method in memorising it.
Nelson suggests we learn these words as part of memorizing the morse code. As part of memorizing, he suggests we pronounce the words and enunciate the syllables/words based on whether they are small or capitalised.
For example, let’s take ‘A’: The word for this should be memorized as ‘a-PAAAART’ where the ‘a’ is a dot and ‘PAAAART’ is a dash
For ‘L’: Memorize the words as ‘los-AAANNN-ge-les
This may sound silly in the beginning but with repeated practice, you will pronounce these words with these enunciations and you can easily associate the syllables with the dots and dashes. I pasted this sheet of paper opposite to where I worked and randomly looked at it and memorized it without spending any additional time
For more information, you can check out his video yourself
Gamification can also speed up our retention of information considerably. If you are an Android user, there is an app called Morse mania where you can practice based on the sounds you would hear for the code and parse the morse code in real-time when you hear the sounds.
In no time, you’ll be able to listen to morse code and find what’s being said. The next time you watch a movie which has morse code, you don’t have to wait for the director to explain it. You would already know and be smug and look cool amongst your friends.
Happy morse coding folks! :)
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