so ive been at this morse thing for about a year now and honestly im kind of frustrated. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to around 13wpm copy pretty comfortably but now i just... cant seem to push past it. like i'll be copying along fine and then i miss one character and suddenly im lost and the whole thing falls apart.

i read somewhere that 13-15wpm is kind of a wall a lot of people hit and that you're supposed to just force yourself to listen at higher speeds even if you're only catching like half of it? tried bumping up to 18wpm and it was pretty rough, felt like i was just guessing most of the time. not sure if that approach actually works or if im doing something wrong.

for context im practicing maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes skipping days. using LCWO for random letter groups and also the W1AW code practice files. anyone else gone through this and actually made it to 20wpm? what finally clicked for you

oh man yeah 13wpm is THE wall, you're definitely not alone. i was stuck there for like 4 months before something finally changed for me. the thing that actually helped was switching away from random letter groups and just doing real QSO text instead. like actual on-air conversation stuff. your brain starts recognizing common words and phrases as sounds instead of individual letters and thats when it starts to feel less like decoding and more like listening.

also the skipping days thing will really kill your momentum with CW. even 10 minutes every single day beats an hour three times a week. its one of those things that needs to be really consistent or your brain just resets. i used the Morse Trainer app on my phone and would do a few minutes at lunch or whatever just to keep it fresh. the speed you copy at now will feel slow eventually but you kinda have to trust the process even when its annoying

and yes the thing about forcing higher speeds is real but dont go too high too fast. maybe try 15-16wpm instead of jumping to 18. you want it to hurt a little but not be completely incomprehensible

went through exactly this last year, got my extra and then spent forever trying to actually get useful on CW. what got me moving again was honestly just getting on the air even though i felt way not ready. like actual QSOs, slow ones on 40m. people are generally pretty patient if you explain youre new to cw, and there's a whole bunch of ops who specifically hang around the novice/tech ends of the bands for this reason. hearing real signals with real fists instead of perfect computer audio made a big difference for me, even though it was harder at first because of the noise and different keying styles and all that

also just my personal experience but Farnsworth timing helped a lot at the speed wall. keeping character speed high like 20wpm but stretching the gaps between characters so you have more time to process. LCWO does this if you dig into the settings.