Learning morse code directly from audio is absolutely essential. Once you have learned all the characters by sound, I found it helpful to listen to code at a faster level than you can handle. You will miss characters, but I found it speeds up your ability to copy well. For example, back when I was taking morse code tests for licenses, I would listen to code at 20 wpm to prepare for the 13 wpm test and 30 wpm to prepare for the 20 wpm test. The tests seemed easy. BTW, I cannot read morse code without making the sounds in my head from the visual representation.
Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural.
There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you ever decide to give it another go: https://lcwo.net/