so i passed my general last year and decided i really wanted to get into CW properly, not just the bare minimum. started with the Koch method back in january using lcwo.net and got up to about 13wpm pretty quickly honestly, like within the first couple months i was feeling good about it. but now its been like 3 or 4 months and i just cannot seem to push past 13. i can copy most characters fine when im relaxed but the second i try to bump the speed up even a little bit things start falling apart and i panic and lose my place.

ive been doing about 20-30 minutes a day which i know maybe isnt enough but its what i can fit in. i also started listening to W1AW code practice on 7.074 or wherever it is, the slow speed ones, and that helps a little but im not sure im doing this the right way anymore.

did anyone else hit this kind of plateau around 13-15wpm? my actual goal is to get to 20 so i can have real ragchew QSOs on 40 meters without sounding like an idiot. any suggestions welcome, even if its just to tell me im being impatient

oh man yeah the 13-15wpm wall is absolutely a real thing, you're not imagining it. i hit it too and i asked around and apparently a lot of people do. what helped me more than anything was forcing myself to just receive on the air even when i couldnt copy everything. like actually tuning around 40m at night and trying to pull calls out, not worrying about getting the whole QSO. your brain starts to recognize patterns and common words and after a while things like CQ and 73 and QTH just come automatically without thinking about individual letters.

also and this might sound counterintuitive but i actually backed the speed up for a while. not all the way back to 5wpm but like dropped to 10 and focused on getting really clean copy with zero mistakes before pushing again. the other thing that made a huge difference was the farnsworth timing if youre not already using that, where the characters are sent at 20wpm but theres extra space between them. trains your ear for fast characters while giving you time to process. lcwo does this i think. anyway dont give up, 20wpm is totally reachable you're not even that far off

just chiming in because im in almost the exact same boat lol, sitting at about 11-12wpm and have been for a while. one thing i started doing recently is the word training on lcwo instead of just random character strings and it feels way different. like my brain wants to find words and when it does it just kinda locks in. might be worth trying if you havent. also heard good things about the CW academy run by CWOPS but i havent signed up yet, the schedule hasnt worked for me