so ive been at this for about 3 months now and i feel like im completely stuck. started with the Koch method using the LCWO website and got up to maybe 5-6 wpm copying but every time i try to push it a little faster my brain just kind of freezes up and i lose the whole word. its frustrating because i can sit there and do 5wpm all day long without any real mistakes but the second i bump it to 7 or 8 i fall apart.

i practice probably 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. been listening to the W1AW code practice sessions too which i heard is good. is there something specific im doing wrong or is this just one of those things where you have to grind through it and it eventually clicks? i really want to get to 20wpm someday, feels like a million miles away right now

oh man this was me about two years ago, almost exactly. the thing that finally helped me break through was forcing myself to listen at speeds way higher than i could copy — like 15 or 18wpm — even when i only caught maybe every third word. what happens is your brain starts recognizing the rhythm and sound of the characters instead of counting dits and dahs. once you stop counting and start hearing, everything speeds up naturally.

also dont practice for too long in one sitting. i found 15-20 minutes focused is way better than an hour where your mind wanders. and try copying by hand first then switch to a keyboard later, some people find one works better than the other. took me about a year to get comfortable at 13wpm and now im sitting around 18 on a good day so it does come eventually, just slow going for most of us

yeah the freezing up thing is totally normal, dont let it discourage you. one thing i read somewhere was to not go back and try to figure out what you missed, just keep moving forward in the text. your brain catches up eventually if you stop trying to decode every single character the moment you hear it. also the LCWO word training mode helped me more than the character training once i had the alphabet down, copying whole common words at speed is really different from copying letters one by one