so ive been at this CW thing for about 4 months now and im stuck. like really stuck. i started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got up to knowing all the characters pretty solid around 5wpm but every time i try to push past that i just fall apart. letters start blurring together and i lose my place and then i panic and miss the next three characters trying to catch up.

ive read that you're supposed to copy in your head and not write everything down but honestly that feels impossible right now. does that actually get easier or am i just wired wrong for this. my elmer keeps telling me to just listen more but i feel like im not making any real progress and its been weeks since i felt like i got better at anything.

how long did it realistically take people to go from being comfortable at 5 to actually being able to hold a QSO at 15 or 20wpm? and is there a point where it just kind of clicks or is it always this grind

oh man this brings back memories, and not all good ones haha. i was exactly where you are probably around 1985 when i was studying for my novice. took me almost a year to get comfortable enough for a real QSO at 13wpm which was the requirement back then. but here's the thing -- the jump from 5 to about 10 felt impossibly slow and then somewhere around 10-12 it sort of... loosened up? like my brain stopped translating dits and dahs and started just hearing letters as sounds. that's when it started feeling less like work.

what helped me most honestly was just tuning into actual QSOs on 40m and listening even when i could only catch maybe half of what was being said. real traffic sounds different from computer generated stuff and your ear adjusts. also dont be so hard on yourself, 4 months is nothing. some guys take a couple years to get to 20 and thats completely fine. the on air practice is really where it happens though, simulators only get you so far.

yeah the not writing thing is huge and it took me forever to actually commit to it. what worked for me was setting the character speed way higher than my overall speed -- like 20wpm characters but with long gaps between them. Farnsworth spacing i think its called. that way your brain learns what fast code actually sounds like but you still have time to process. if you just slow everything down uniformly your brain learns slow code and then has to basically relearn later.

i went from nothing to passing the 10wpm test in maybe 6 months but i was doing like 20-30 minutes a day pretty consistently. some days felt like i went backwards. just keep going honestly