Two issues in Morse code learning

 Even keeping a distance from Morse code, I am still concerned how it is alive and used in ham radio. Looking around SNS groups, I found a couple of trends in learning procedure of Morse code.

Firstly, most of the beginners are learning it through some sofe ware. It is a quite frequent question made by them in SNS what soft ware is the best to learn it. Actually, I haven't tried any such soft ware by myself and not eligible to mention about it. But I would question if it is the best or the only way to learn it. Learning through soft ware may help people a lot to remember all characters in Morse code in the beginning. After that step, is soft ware learning ideal way or not, I wonder.

I won't idealize how we have learned Morse code back in '60s. Those days, after remembering all the characters, we were listening to CW bands every day. We could first copy only a part of call signs. However, while going on listening on the bands, we found ourselves to be able to copy everything. The world has started to be opened all of sudden. I should say the progress is step wise. So we should keep ourselves grinding into it for weeks or even monthes. We need to go through that flat floor until we could go up to the higher place. While doing SWLing, we could learn how to operate radio and what ettiauette we should keep in operation. In actual communication, we should do with fading or interference which we could experience only on the air but not with computer. I wonder why experienced operators won't advise new comers to train this way.  

I sometimes find advices from senior operators to beginners to copy words en bloc. Copying each word as a whole for its sounding may help, as they advice, to copy code faster. I believe it would embarrass beginners. Our short term memory buffer is limited. A large cluster dots/dashes is hard to remember. I guess advising that way, the senior operators are not conscious of what's going on in reception process. We are taking the meaning of the message at every moment. When we copy a part of the word being sent, we subconsciously try to read the latter part of the word. We guess what word should follow in the context. Reading a sentence or even a whole message, we are guessing what to come next from the context. It is done almost unconsciously. This is the process of head copy. In stead of advising young beginners to remember the sound of a word as a whole, we should encourage them to read the word. sentence and message. It is a continuous process of reading.