so ive been at this for about 8 months now and i'm stuck. when i first started learning CW i was thrilled just to copy anything at all, got up to 5wpm pretty quickly using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and thought okay this is going to be smooth sailing. yeah no.

the jump from 5 to maybe 10-12wpm felt hard but doable. but now im sitting somewhere around 13-14wpm on a good day and i just... hit a wall. i can copy fine when im relaxed and the sender is clean but the moment i fall behind on even one character my brain locks up and i lose the whole word and then the next one and suddenly im just listening to noise.

ive read that you're supposed to just listen at speeds faster than you can copy and let your brain adjust but honestly that just makes me feel dumb and i turn it off after 5 minutes. has anyone actually broken through this plateau? what did it take? did you just grind daily sessions or was there some technique that clicked? i do about 20-30 minutes a day which i thought was enough but maybe not

oh man this is like reading my own journal from two years ago. the plateau between 12 and 18wpm is real and pretty much everyone hits it, you're not doing anything wrong.

what finally got me moving again was two things. first i stopped worrying about copying every single character and started trying to copy words as whole units instead of letter by letter. sounds obvious but i was still sounding out each dit and dah in my head which just doesn't scale up. the second thing was jumping into actual QSOs way before i felt ready. even if i only caught half of what the other guy sent, making myself respond and stay in the exchange forced my brain to process faster than any practice software ever did. the slow net on 40m was a lifesaver for me, people are patient and nobody cares if you ask for a repeat.

the high speed listening thing works eventually but not if you're actively trying to copy it. just have it on in the background while you're doing something else. like actually something else, not half-listening. it takes weeks but something does change.

just chiming in cause im in almost the exact same spot, like 13wpm on a good day and it feels like running through mud. one thing that helped me a little bit was the LCWO website, you can set the character speed high like 20wpm but slow down the word spacing so you have time to think. its not the same as real QSO speed but it kind of bridges the gap i think. anyway still working on it myself so take that for what its worth lol