so ive been at this CW thing for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and it feels like a wall. when i first started i was using the G4FON trainer and just doing random characters for like 20 minutes a day and honestly the first couple months felt great, went from barely copying anything to being able to pick out words here and there. but now progress feels really slow and i dont know if im doing something wrong or if this is just how it goes.

a buddy of mine who got his Extra back in the 80s says i should be doing Koch method and setting my character speed higher than my overall speed — like 20wpm characters but only 5wpm effective speed or whatever that's called. i tried it for a week and it was honestly really frustrating, felt like i was starting over from scratch. did anyone else find that transition rough

also i keep second guessing whether i should just jump on the air at my current speed and deal with the embarrassment or keep practicing offline until im more solid. i want to eventually do some QRP /p stuff and actually hold real contacts, not just exchange signal reports.

yeah that wall around 8-10wpm is super common, pretty much everyone hits it. what's happening is your brain is still spelling out individual letters instead of hearing whole words as sounds, and that transition is genuinely hard. the Farnsworth method your buddy mentioned — that's exactly the right move, it trains your ear to hear characters at real speed even when there's space between them so you never develop the habit of counting dots and dashes.

i went through this myself maybe six years ago. what actually helped me more than anything was just listening to real QSOs on 40m with a decoder running alongside so i could sanity check what i was hearing. even if i only copied 40% of it something about real callsigns and real exchanges made it click faster than any software trainer. w1aw also does code practice broadcasts at different speeds and they publish the text ahead of time so you can follow along — honestly underrated resource.

as for getting on the air, just do it. seriously. find a slow speed net, there are a few specifically for people practicing. nobody is going to laugh at you for sending 8wpm, cw ops are generally pretty patient with folks learning. the real contacts will help more than another month of offline practice, i promise.

im kind of in the same boat lol, maybe a little further along at like 12wpm but still feel like im fighting it every day. one thing that helped me weirdly was just having CW on in the background while doing other stuff — not even actively trying to copy, just passively listening. i dont know if theres science behind it or whatever but after a few weeks of that i started recognizing common words and prosigns without thinking about it.

also just fyi the LCWO website has a really good Koch trainer if you havent tried it, some people like it better than G4FON just depends what clicks for you