so ive been working on my CW for about a year now, started from zero and got up to around 13wpm pretty quick honestly, but now its like i hit a wall and cant seem to push through no matter what i do. i practice probably 4 or 5 days a week with the LCWO site and some of the Koch method stuff, copying random QSO text, that kind of thing. head copy is still a mess for me above about 10wpm which i know is probably the bottleneck but man its frustrating.

the weird thing is if i listen to slow code i get bored and my brain just checks out, but if i crank it up past where im comfortable i fall apart after like 30 seconds. feels like theres no middle ground. wondering if anyone else went through this plateau and what actually helped. i really want to hit 20wpm, thats the goal, been at this for long enough i feel like i should be farther along than i am

oh man yeah i remember this exact feeling, i was stuck around 12-13 for what felt like forever. what finally broke me out of it was honestly just doing shorter sessions at a higher speed than i was comfortable with — like instead of 30 minutes at 13, i'd do 5 minutes at 17 or 18 and then take a break, let my brain process. felt like nothing was sticking but after a few weeks something just clicked.

also the word farnsworth spacing thing helped me a lot. if you havent tried it, basically the characters come at full speed (like 20wpm character speed) but theres extra space between them so you get more time to think. LCWO lets you set this up. it trains your ear to hear the characters at the right speed without the overload of everything flying at you too fast. the goal is to slowly reduce that extra spacing over weeks until your brain catches up. it's slow going but it actually works differently than just turning up the speed and white knuckling through it.

dont give up on head copy either, copying on paper actually slows you down mentally after a while because your brain gets focused on the writing instead of the listening

just chiming in cause im in almost the exact same boat, sitting at about 11wpm and watching 20 feel impossibly far away lol. someone told me to just get on the air and make actual contacts even if i have to go slow, the real QSO pressure supposedly forces your brain to adapt faster than just practicing alone. havent worked up the nerve yet tbh but maybe that applies to you too if youre not already doing it