Can you understand that? Because I can't. But we're going to learn how to do it together. I'm going to teach you how to memorize or learn Morse code in this video. Let's do it.
So the story goes that Samuel Morse was away from his wife and got a letter saying that she was very sick. He immediately went home which took him a lot of time and by the time he got home he found out that she had actually already passed away and was even buried. Can you imagine?
So he became dead set on figuring out how to make communication a lot quicker and subsequently came up with Morse code. What we're gonna do in this video is figure out how to get it in our heads I'm gonna teach you two ways and I'm gonna learn it at the same time One way is just kind of the quick and dirty way It's not gonna take very much time and what it'll do is it'll put enough information in your head so that you along with a piece of paper can write out Basically the Morse code chart and from there you could listen to Morse code or write it So you would have the chart in your head now, that's great for that specific purpose but if you heard Morse code randomly in a restaurant or an airplane or wherever you are you would have to quickly jot out this chart and figure it out chances are you probably can't do that so the second version of memorizing Morse code will be how to actually memorize what the sounds are for each letter so that if you ever hear Morse code beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep you can actually translate it as it's happening to you which would be pretty cool So the very basics of Morse code is that it's made up of dots and dashes. Dot and a dash.
Now different combinations of the dots and the dashes will produce different letters. And then different combinations of those letters will obviously create a dash. create words and then combination of the words will create sentences combination of sentences will create paragraphs when you're beeping out each letter dots take up one beat and then dashes take up three of those beats now the reason the tempo matters is because obviously when you get to different words you want to have some kind of spacing between it. Space between two letters in a word would be three lengths or three beats and then between words would be seven. Okay so that way you can build words and you know where one letter starts, one word starts, etc.
We won't worry about that for now. Let's get to the basics of how to memorize the simplest form of the Morse code so that you can write it out and then do it by ear. Alright, so our first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna learn some really weird story. And it goes like this.
I want you to picture that there is an ET, an extraterrestrial, and his name happens to be Ian. Hey Ian. I-A-N. That's his name. just a regular name ian and ian suddenly he's very open-minded he says sure and what's gonna happen is he gets some wd-40 and before he does something with it he says to himself out loud k go okay I'm ready, go.
For some reason, he uses that oil to turn on some high voltage frequency. I don't know what that means, but just imagine that somehow with the WD-40, he has some high voltage frequency suddenly coursing through his veins. He pauses for a second and says to himself, LOL, it was a funny experience.
That was an extraterrestrial, whatever. Once that's all done, he puts on his PJs, gets ready for bed, gets inside of a box, because that's where apparently ETs sleep, and the box happens to be sized Q, because Q is the size of all boxes in this extraterrestrial planet. Duh. That's it. So what we've actually memorized there is just the alphabet in a certain order.
Their frequency in the English language, more or less. It's actually not quite correct, but it's close enough. So if we write out what we have, we have E-T, right?
E-T. His name was Ian, right? And he said, mmm, sure.
M S U R. Then he gets the WD 40 WD and says, K go, K go. Then he turns on the high voltage frequency pauses, right? I'll put a space here. Last to himself, LOL. That's just an L.
And then another pause we have, he puts on his PJs, gets in a box BX, and then it's size Q. Here's a little bit of a stretch, but C Y Z. So C Y Z. and then Q.
The way it works is actually there's a binary tree that can be drawn. If I have my letters here, you start at the top, I'll put a little circle here, that's where you start, and you branch out at every node you branch out. So to the left and to the right, I'm gonna read from left to right the alphabet that I just wrote down here. So the first would be E, then T. And those happen to be the most frequent letters in the English alphabet.
Then we branch each of those down further into two. And my next two letters are I and A. And then we have N. and M, which is going across from left to right. We continue down, breaking those into further things.
I'm running out of room here but I'll show you the actual chart in a little bit. So after M was S U R W D K A, G, O. And so on and so on. I'll let you guys finish that.
I'll show the graphic in a second so you can follow along completely. So if you go down the branches to the left, that's a dot. And going right down a branch is a dash. And you can literally read out what each letter is if you follow this track and say to yourself, okay, if I'm going left, that's a dot.
If I'm going right, that's a dash. And then you just compile them all together to create the letter. If I go to the left for the E, that's just a dot. And that is the Morse code for E, dot.
And then if I go to the the right for T it's a dash. Now let's say we want to get to S. Now what am I gonna do?
I'm gonna follow my branches here. I go down the E, that's a dot. I go down the I, that's another left move, that's another dot.
And then I go another left branch move, that's another dot. So S happens to be dot dot dot. Let's say I want to go to O, I would go down to T, that's a dash. Okay so I have a dash so far.
I go down to M, again that's the right, that's another dash. And then I go to O, that's another dash. So O is actually dash dash dash.
So now I'm Now if we look at this chart for the very, there's one more layer, I didn't draw it out here, but you can see it in the chart. You see HVF from the leftmost, and then there's a space. Remember I told you there was a space? The L sits there alone as the left part of R. Then we have P, J, B, X, C, Y, Z, Q. It just goes all the way across.
And then, of course, the last two under O, there's no more letters of the alphabet. But let's say we want to figure out what B is, right? Which is pretty deep down the tree. So I go to the right to get to T.
That's a dash. I go to the left to get to N. That's a dot. I see that I have to go down to D and B, which are both dots. So B is actually dash, dot, dot, dot.
Cool. So the next step, we're going to memorize what each letter actually sounds like. People who are very proficient in Morse code have suggested that you should not learn what it looks like as a mnemonic. So because my first instinct was, OK, maybe I'll think of I'll look at what each letter looks like.
as dots and dashes and I'll think of a picture, something that it looks like. But apparently that's really tough and once you learn it that way, it's actually hard to translate it to audio. So the suggestions I've read are to turn it immediately into some sound and then that will always help you remember when you hear the sound, which is all. ultimately what you want to be able to do.
So the way this works is for every letter in the alphabet we're basically going to have a little phrase okay that has some kind of stress on syllables that will help you remember a dot versus a dash. Remember a dot is very quick and a dash is a bit longer more stressed upon. So the word that we're going to come up with or the phrase it's going to have a similar structure as the dots and dashes of the actual letter itself.
So let's start with our first example here at the letter a. Now if I just remember the word apart. The way I stress it in my head is a part. The A is short, the part is long. We have a dot and a dash.
A part. And some of these are totally weird. Hopefully they're weird enough that you can remember them. So B is going to be Bob is the man.
Bob is the man. Bob is the man. Bob is the man. Bob is the man is dash dot dot dot. Bob is the man.
Now it's important when you learn these as I'm saying them to hear them as I stress them because that's gonna help you remember them Bob is the man Bob is the man Bob is the man be Let's move on to see this one's easy. I just think of coca-cola, but I pronounce like this coca-cola coca-cola the way morse code is for c is dash dot dash dot d is dog did it dog did it the dog did it right whatever the dog did he did it so dog did it which is dash dot dot Let's move on. I'll do a few more of these and then we'll kind of go through it a little quicker.
You can spend your time learning those and practicing vocalizing it with those stressed syllables, right? So you know what it's supposed to sound like, what it will be like in dots and dashes. Okay, so E. This is my favorite one and the easiest to learn.
You may not even need this since we know, if you remember from the chart, that it's at the very top of our tree. It's just a dot. The way I remember it is I just remember eh, like someone questioning eh. Very quick, it's just a dot. Eh.
That's easy. Alright, so for F, fetch a fire, man. Fetch a fire, man.
Can you guess what that is? Dot dot dash dot. Fetch a fire.
Firemen. Dot dot dash dot. And remember, when you come up with these little weird stories, try to actually visualize what you're saying.
Fetching a fireman? What does that even mean? Are you fetching an actual globule of flame and bringing it somewhere? Are you fetching a fireman, like an actual dude firefighter, right?
Carrying him over your shoulder? All right, so G, this is one of my favorite ones, just because it sounds fun, is good gravy. Good gravy.
Dash dash dot. Good. Gravy.
Just think of your Thanksgiving, your grandma's delicious good gravy. As you're drinking that gravy or you've poured it all over your turkey, you say good gravy. Just like that.
All right, so the letter H continuing on is really easy. It's hippity hop. Everything is short, quick syllables.
So that's just one, two, three, four little dots. Hippity hop. So for I, I can remember I bid.
Like I bid on that. that thing on eBay that I wanted so much. I bid. Those are just two quick dots.
I bid. Okay, J. I'm gonna think of the Jaws movie and the phrase is in Jaws, Jaws, Jaws. So it's a dot, dash, dash, dash.
In Jaws, Jaws, Jaws. Okay, K is a good one. Kangaroo. Kangaroo.
L is Los Angeles. Los Angeles. M you can just remember is mmm mmm. Dash dash.
So something really delicious twice. N you can remember as nudist. Dash dot. Nudist.
O you can remember as oh my god. Three long dashes. This is a fun one. P is a poopy smell.
Dot dash dash dot. A poopy smell. Q is God save the queen. Dash dash dot dash. God save the queen.
R, you can remember something rotating. Rotation. Rotation. Rotation. S, we said before, is going to be dot, dot, dot.
And the way you can remember that is just think of some really Spanish person saying, si, si, si. For T, we have just a dash. Remember, it was at the top of our tree here, just a single dash. You can just remember it with a single long stress word that is starting with T, like tall. All right, for U, you can use the word uniform.
and say it like this uniform uniform so dot dot dash uniform for this one it's victory v quick three dots and a dash victory v dot dot dot dash victory v there you go w i think of world war so you could say the world war the world war the world war and so for x we have x marks the spot x marks The spot. Why? You're a cool dude. You're a cool dude. And finally, we have Z.
This one's a bit weird, but zinc zookeeper. Dash, dash, dot, dot. There you go. So there you have it. You now have this lovely piece of paper committed to memory based on what you heard me say weirdly.
So now let's see if you can actually understand what was being beeped out. At the beginning of this video I'll play it very slow at five words per minute M E M O R Y Memory What happened? I think he's talking He's not with the words What is that? Morse code.
H-E-R-E. Here. Sweet!
That's the end of this video. I hope this was super helpful. I'm going to give you one last message as I say my goodbyes here.
I'm out. Subscribe. Oh yeah, like the video, all the things.
Comment in the description with a Morse code message so that nobody can see it except you and I and I guess everybody else who knows Morse code. Yeah, I'm out.