so i passed my general back in the spring and ive been trying to work on my CW ever since. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to about 13wpm receiving but i just cant seem to break through that wall. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes i skip a day or two if work gets crazy. sending is actually not bad, i feel pretty comfortable around 10-12wpm sending but receiving anything faster than 13 just turns into mush in my head.

i know people say the jump from 5 to 13 is actually the easy part and the jump to 20 is where it gets hard, and man they werent kidding. i read somewhere that you have to stop hearing individual dots and dashes and start hearing whole words as sounds, like how you recognize a word when someone says it without spelling it out. i get the concept but i dont know how to actually make my brain do that. anybody been through this and come out the other side? feels like im spinning my wheels

yeah that plateau around 12-14 is super real, i hit it too and honestly almost gave up on CW entirely. what finally worked for me was two things. first i started using the Farnsworth method where the characters themselves are sent at like 20wpm but the spacing between them is stretched out, so your brain learns the sound of each letter at speed even when you have more time to process. LCWO lets you set this up pretty easily, character speed at 20 and effective speed at whatever feels manageable.

second thing, and this is the one people dont talk about enough, i started just listening to actual QSOs on the air. not trying to copy everything, just having it on in the background while i was doing other stuff around the shack. after a few weeks my brain started picking out words without me even trying. common stuff like 599, QTH, UR, TNX just started jumping out automatically. its kind of a slow burn but it works. also head copy practice, even just 3 or 4 characters at a time without writing anything down. forces you to hold stuff in your head instead of relying on your pencil to think for you.

im in almost the exact same boat lol, stuck around 14wpm for like two months now. one thing i tried that seemed to help a little is the G4FON trainer, its free and you can set it up to drill common words and phrases instead of random characters. feels more like actual ham radio that way. havent cracked 20 yet but 16 is starting to feel less impossible so maybe its working