so ive been at this for a while now and im just kinda venting but also genuinely asking for advice. started learning cw back in the spring, got up to about 5wpm pretty quick with just chirpity and some youtube videos, then kept pushing and hit 13wpm maybe six weeks in. and then just... stopped. like my brain refuses to go faster.

i know the letters fine at speed individually, i can copy them when the trainer throws single characters at me fast, but the moment its actual words or QSOs my head just locks up. i start trying to spell things out instead of just hearing words and it all falls apart. someone told me the jump from 13 to 20 is where most people quit and honestly i believe them now.

currently doing about 20 minutes a day with lcwo, character speed at 20 but effective word speed at like 13 (farnsworth i think thats called). should i just push the effective speed up and suffer through it or is there a better way. feels like im doing something wrong

oh man yeah the 13wpm wall is absolutely real, i hit the exact same thing and it lasted way longer than i wanted to admit. what worked for me was honestly just forcing myself to stop writing anything down for a while. like i mean it, put the pencil away completely. you can't copy what you cant get anyway so you end up training yourself to just let stuff go and keep listening rather than freezing on one word and missing the next three.

also the farnsworth thing — i'd say keep your character speed where it is or even bump it to 25, but slowly creep the effective speed up maybe half a wpm every few days rather than jumping it. the goal is to get your brain associating the sound with the word or meaning, not the individual dits and dahs. once that clicks it really does click. took me probably three months of daily practice to get comfortable at 20 and i still have bad days. just dont give up, it comes.

have you tried just listening to actual qso recordings? like not trying to copy everything just having it on while you do something else. i dunno if thats scientifically proven or whatever but i swear it helped me get used to the rhythm of real traffic. there's some good stuff on the web, morse code ninja has a ton of free material at different speeds. his word lists at 20wpm with the long spacing helped me more than any trainer tbh