so ive been at this for a while now and i cant seem to push past about 13wpm no matter what i do. started learning morse back in the spring, got to 5wpm pretty quick which felt great, then climbed up to around 10-13 over the summer but now its like i hit a wall and nothing is working.

i've been using the lcwo website which i really like, and i do the koch method sessions maybe 4 or 5 times a week for like 20-30 minutes each time. the problem is i keep having to mentally sound out the letters and count dits and dahs in my head which i know is wrong but i cant stop doing it. someone at the club told me i need to just go faster even if i make tons of errors but that feels really discouraging when im copying maybe 40% at 18wpm.

has anyone actually made it through this plateau and gotten to 20 or above? how long did it take and what finally clicked for you? i really want to get on the air with cw, not just do practice sessions forever

oh man i remember this exact feeling, it was probably the most frustrating part of the whole journey for me. the thing that finally broke me through was stopping all the practice software for like two weeks and just listening to actual QSOs on 40 meters. not trying to copy everything, just leaving it on in the background while i did other stuff around the shack. your brain starts to pick up the rhythm of real operators and it kind of rewires how you process the characters.

also the thing your club friend said about going faster isnt wrong exactly but the way it helped me was i raised the character speed to like 20wpm but kept the farnsworth spacing really wide so i had more time between characters to process each one without slowing down the actual sound of the letters. that way your ear learns what a fast C or a fast R actually sounds like without the pressure of copying a whole word every second. after maybe a month of that i started closing the farnsworth gap little by little and it just kind of came together. you'll get there, 13 to 20 is honestly the hardest stretch and everyone hits that same wall around 12-15

yeah im kind of in the same boat actually, hovering around 11-12wpm and been there since like august. one thing i started doing is the word training on lcwo instead of just characters, like practicing common cw words and abbreviations so i recognize whole chunks instead of building letter by letter. cq de and 73 and stuff like that just pop out now without thinking which feels like progress at least. not sure if it'll get me to 20 but its way less boring than the plain character drills