so i passed my general last year and decided i really wanted to learn morse code properly, not just the minimum to pass or whatever. started with just convert, learn the alphabet stuff and got up to about 5wpm pretty quick. felt good. then over like 3 months got myself to 13wpm and now i am just absolutely stuck. been at 13 for probably 4 months now.

im doing about 20 minutes a day with the LCWO site, sending with my straight key, copying on paper. i can hear the letters fine when i know what word is coming but in actual QSOs or even just random code practice i fall apart above 13. like my brain just stops processing and i start trying to count dits and dahs again which obviously makes everything worse.

anybody been through this wall? is there something specific that finally clicked for it? ive heard people say just listen to faster code even if you cant copy it all but that seems kind of pointless to me. open to anything at this point because 20wpm feels like another planet from here

oh man yeah that 13wpm wall is so real, i hit the exact same thing and honestly it lasted longer for me. what finally broke it was when i stopped trying to copy every single character and just let some go. sounds counterintuitive but when you panic about missing a letter your brain locks up and you miss the next three too.

the other thing, and this is what a bunch of the old timers told me that i didnt believe at first — bump your practice speed way up, like to 20 or even 25wpm character speed but with extra spacing between characters. thats the farnsworth method if you havent heard of it. LCWO does this actually, you can set character speed separate from overall speed. what it does is train your ear to hear the characters as sounds not as dots and dashes, which is the whole game at higher speeds. counting dits and dahs is a dead end past about 10wpm, you probably already know that but its worth repeating.

also are you doing any actual on-air stuff? even just listening to qso's on 40m or whatever. the real world stuff sounds different from generated practice and its good to just soak it in even when you cant copy everything. give it another few weeks with the farnsworth spacing thing and see if it moves at all

just went through this myself like 6 months ago, got to 20wpm in december finally. honestly what helped me more than anything was the CW academy, its free and you work with a group which sounds weird but it really keeps you accountable. also just sending more helped me, i had been mostly receiving and my sending was sloppy which i think was messing with how i heard code in my head if that makes sense.