so i passed my general last year and have been working on morse pretty much since then. started with just5 wpm copying random characters and slowly worked up to where i am now which is somewhere around 12-13 wpm on a good day. the problem is i feel like i just hit a wall and cant seem to push past it no matter what i do.

ive been using the LCWO website mostly, doing the Koch method, and i can copy most of the characters fine at this speed but when i try to bump it up even a little bit everything kind of falls apart and i start getting behind and then i panic and miss whole words trying to catch up. not sure if its a technique problem or if im just not practicing enough or what. does anyone have advice for going from this intermediate stage up to like 20wpm eventually? feels like the jump from 5 to 13 was way easier than this is turning out to be

oh man i remember this exact feeling, i was stuck around 12-13 for probably six months and it was super frustrating. what finally helped me was two things — first, i stopped trying to write everything down. once you start copying on paper your brain is doing two things at once and it really slows you down at higher speeds. try just listening and letting it go if you miss something, your brain will start to fill in gaps way better than you think.

second thing, and this one sounds counterintuitive, is to spend time listening to stuff thats WAY faster than you can copy. like put on 25 or 30wpm and just let it wash over you for 20 minutes. you wont copy any of it but your ear starts to get used to the rhythm and the way letters clump together. i think its called shadowing or something like that. after a few weeks of mixing that in with my normal practice i broke through pretty quick. also just get on the air, even if its scary, because real qsos do something for you that software practice cant

yeah the 13wpm wall is real lol, i hit it too. one thing someone told me was to make sure youre not counting dits and dahs anymore — if you still hear R as dit-dah-dit instead of just... R, then that might be part of whats slowing you down at speed. at 20wpm the characters come too fast to count anything. not sure how to fix it exactly other than just forcing yourself to go faster and accepting youll miss stuff for a while until it clicks