so ive been at this for about 8 months now and the progress from 5 to around 12-13 wpm felt pretty natural, i was using the Koch method through the lcwo website and just grinding through the lessons every morning before work. but somewhere around 13 wpm it just... stopped. like i hit a wall and i cant seem to push past it no matter what i do.

the weird thing is i can copy numbers and common words like CQ DE RST 599 no problem at a higher speed, its the less common letters and especially certain combinations that trip me up. Q and Y specifically just destroy me. i slow down to write them out and then ive missed the next two characters already.

ive been doing about 20-30 min a day which i know isnt a ton. should i be doing more sessions? different material? ive tried listening to W1AW code practice but i feel like im just lost half the time at their faster speeds. any advice from people who actually pushed through this plateau would be great, i dont want to give up on CW, always wanted to get a ticket back when you needed it and now that i finally have time i really want to make it work

that plateau around 13-14 is super common, almost everybody hits it there. what helped me was honestly just switching away from copying every letter to trying to copy whole words. your brain is still sounding out individual characters and writing each one down which works great up to a point but then it becomes the bottleneck. try not writing anything, just listen for a few minutes. sounds counterintuitive but it starts training you to recognize patterns instead of decoding sounds.

also the Farnsworth method helped me a lot — basically setting the character speed high like 20-25 wpm but the word spacing slow enough that you have time to process. LCWO lets you do this. what happens is your brain starts learning what 20wpm characters actually sound like instead of a stretched out version. when you narrow the gap over time you kind of arrive at real speed without realizing it. took me a few months of that before 20wpm started clicking. Q and Y will come, they just take longer for some people, hang in there.

im kind of in the same boat actually, stuck around 15 right now so following this thread. one thing i started doing was listening to actual QSOs on 40m with the volume low while im doing other stuff around the shack, not even trying to copy just kind of ambient listening. no idea if its helping scientifically but it feels like the rhythm is getting more natural? maybe placebo who knows lol