so ive been at this for about 8 months now and started from basically zero, did the whole koch method thing starting at 5wpm and honestly it went pretty smooth up until around 10-11wpm. felt like i was making real progress every couple weeks. but now im stuck somewhere around 13wpm and its been like 6 weeks of just... not improving. im still copying maybe 80% in a QSO but there's always a few characters that just fall apart on me, usually when the other op speeds up a little or has a slightly different fist than what im used to hearing on the practice recordings.

my current routine is about 20-30 minutes a day on lcwo and then i try to get on 40m in the evenings and actually make contacts when the band cooperates. i know people say just do more contacts but i feel like im missing something methodologically. did anyone else hit a plateau around this speed and figure out what broke them through it? i've heard about bumping your target speed up to like 18-20 even if you're only catching half of it, is that actually worth doing or is it just frustrating yourself for no reason?

yeah that 12-15wpm range is a real wall for a lot of people, theres actually a name for it sometimes called the "code plateau" -- you're at the speed where you cant sound out dits and dahs consciously anymore but you havent quite built the automatic pattern recognition that gets you to the other side. the trick that worked for me back in the day (and i had my 20wpm ticket back when that was still required) was to do what you mentioned -- bump the practice speed WAY up, like uncomfortably fast. not because you'll copy it but because it trains your brain to stop trying to translate and just listen for shapes. i used to listen to 25wpm and only catch maybe 4 words a minute and it felt pointless but after a few weeks of mixing that with my regular speed practice my 15wpm copy just opened right up.

also dont overlook the fist thing. practice recordings are too clean. get on the air more, even if you just listen to ragchews on 40 without trying to join. different operators, different timing, different keyers. that variety is huge.

im kind of in the same boat actually, around 14wpm right now. one thing that helped me a little was switching from just doing random character groups on lcwo to copying actual words and common QSO phrases. like my brain started recognizing "599" and "73" and "QTH" as whole chunks instead of individual letters and that freed up some processing power i guess? i dunno if thats real or just placebo but the numbers especially used to kill me and now they're mostly fine. still struggle with punctuation though lol