so ive been trying to learn morse code for about 4 months now and im stuck at 5wpm and it feels like a wall. i can copy maybe 70% at that speed but the moment anything speeds up even a little bit my brain just freezes and i start trying to count dits and dahs again which i know is wrong but i cant help it.

ive been using the LCWO website and doing the Koch method but honestly some days i feel like im going backwards. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i thought would be enough. my goal is to get to 20wpm eventually, i keep reading about people who got there in a year or less and i dont understand how they did it.

has anyone actually gone through this and gotten past it? what clicked for you? im not in a rush i just want to make sure im not wasting my time doing something wrong from the start

oh man yeah that wall you're talking about is completely real, almost everyone hits it around 5-7wpm. the problem is exactly what you described — your brain is still decoding individual dits and dahs instead of hearing the whole character as a sound. its like reading letter by letter instead of seeing the whole word at once.

the thing that finally worked for me was bumping the character speed way up even while keeping the overall word speed slow. on LCWO you can set the farnsworth timing so the letters come at like 18-20wpm but with long gaps between them. your brain is forced to hear the character as one chunk of sound instead of counting elements. feels weird at first and your copy rate will drop but stick with it for a few weeks and something just kind of... unlocks.

also honestly just listening to actual QSOs on 40m or 20m even if you cant copy much of it yet helps a lot. just having it on in the background while youre doing something else. dont stress it, 4 months is nothing in the grand scheme of CW learning

im kind of in the same boat, been at it 6 months and just cracked 10wpm last week finally. what helped me was the G4FON trainer with farnsworth method like the other guy said, and also just getting on the air and making actual contacts even when its terrifying. there's a slow speed net on 80m near me, 5wpm QRS stuff, and hearing a real person send to you is completely different from the computer. you care more so you focus more i guess.

also don't practice more than 30 min at a stretch, i read somewhere your brain needs time to consolidate and i think thats actually true. i was doing hour long sessions and it wasnt helping nearly as much as shorter ones spread through the day