so ive been at this for almost two years now and i want to share what finally got me moving because i wasted so much time doing the wrong things early on

when i first started i was doing the whole thing where you count dots and dashes and that absolutely killed me, i stayed at 5wpm for like 8 months just spinning my wheels. the characters never became automatic they were always just math problems in my head

what finally clicked was switching to Koch method and forcing myself to listen at 20wpm character speed even when my overall speed was like 7 or 8. i hated it at first because i was missing so much but after about 3-4 weeks something in my brain just started to recognize the sounds as whole units instead of pieces. like the letter C stopped being dah-dit-dah-dit and started just sounding like... C. hard to explain

also the thing nobody told me was that copying in your head is way different from copying onto paper or a keyboard. i practiced writing everything down for months and then i started just listening without writing and my accuracy actually went up because i wasnt panicking trying to keep up with my pencil

anyway im at about 18-19wpm solid now and occasionally hitting 20 on a good day. curious if anyone else had a similar experience or if there were other methods that worked. i feel like there's so much conflicting advice out there when youre just starting

yeah the counting dots and dashes thing is a trap, i think every new ham falls into it because it seems logical but it completely prevents you from ever getting fast. same thing happened to me back in the late 90s before there was much online stuff, my elmer actually grabbed my pencil out of my hand during a practice session and said just listen, dont write, just listen. i thought he was being ornery but he was right

the Koch method is solid, G4FON's software on windows is still what i point people to even though its old, and jst5 on android works pretty well if youre doing mobile practice during a commute or whatever. the key thing you figured out about character speed vs overall speed is exactly right, its called farnsworth timing and most decent practice software supports it. you want your brain to learn the shape of each letter at full speed even if theres a long gap between letters so you have time to process

one more thing that made a huge difference for me personally was actual on-air practice. copying practice files is fine but real qso's have a different kind of pressure and also real operators dont always send perfectly which actually helps you learn to fill in gaps from context. find a slow speed net or qrs frequency and just jump in, worst case you send agn and ask for a repeat, nobody minds

this is really encouraging to read, im still pretty much stuck around 7wpm and getting frustrated. i didnt know about the farnsworth thing ill have to look that up. does it matter which software you use or is it mostly just about putting the time in every day