so i passed my general last year and picked up CW kind of on a whim, started with the LCWO site doing Koch method and got up to about 13wpm pretty quickly but now i feel like i've completely hit a wall. like i'll sit down and copy for 20 minutes and just feel like im going backwards some days.

when i first started at 5wpm everything felt slow but manageable and i could actually write down what i heard. now at 13 i'm catching most of it but then i miss one character and my brain just locks up trying to figure out what i missed and then i miss the next three characters too. its this horrible cascade effect and i dont know how to break out of it.

been at this for probably 4 months now doing maybe 30-45 minutes a day. read somewhere that 20wpm is kind of the magic number where code starts to actually feel natural and you stop counting dits and dahs. is that true and how do you actually get there without losing your mind in the middle range

oh man yeah that 10-15wpm range is brutal, its almost like a rite of passage that nobody warns you about. what youre describing with the cascade effect is totally normal — your brain is still processing character by character instead of just hearing the whole thing as a sound. the fix for that, and i know it sounds counterintuitive, is to just let the missed characters go. seriously just move on and catch the next one. the moment you stop trying to backfill the gap your copy actually improves.

what really helped me years ago was listening to code way above my copying speed, like just putting on 25wpm and not even trying to write anything, just letting it wash over me for 15-20 minutes a day. your brain starts to absorb the rhythm of it even when you cant consciously decode it. took me probably 6 weeks of that before i noticed a difference but it worked. also the W1AW code practice sessions are good because its real on-air content with actual QSO stuff, not just random letters, and that context helps a lot more than people think.

im kind of in the same boat actually, sitting at around 15wpm and have been for a while so watching this thread closely. one thing that did help me a little was switching from writing everything down to just typing on a keyboard — something about not having to think about handwriting freed up some mental bandwidth i guess. also started doing the daily QST on LCWO which has real words instead of random strings and that felt way less frustrating for some reason.