so ive been at this for a while now and i just cant seem to break through the 13wpm wall. started back in the spring at about 5wpm with the Koch method and honestly the first few months were great, was moving up pretty steady. but somewhere around 11-12wpm things slowed down a lot and now im just kind of spinning my wheels at 13.

my practice routine is probably 20-30 minutes a day using the LCWO website, sometimes i throw on some of the W1AW practice sessions when i remember. i can copy most of what i hear but i still find myself spelling out letters in my head instead of just hearing the whole word as a sound if that makes sense. like i KNOW thats the problem but i dont know how to fix it. anyone been through this and found something that actually helped? feels like 20wpm is a million miles away right now

oh man yeah that 13wpm plateau is so real, i think almost everyone hits it somewhere between 10 and 15. what worked for me was forcing myself to practice at speeds i absolutely could NOT copy cleanly. like set LCWO to 18 or even 20wpm and just let it wash over you even if you only catch a letter here and there. feels awful and discouraging at first but your brain starts to adjust to hearing the characters as whole sounds instead of counting dots and dashes. give it a few weeks of that and then drop back to 15 and see how it feels.

also the head copying thing -- that just takes time honestly. common words help a lot, like start recognizing CQ and 73 and the and that as single units. some people swear by listening to actual QSOs on the air instead of random letter groups, real words give your brain patterns to grab onto.

i was stuck at almost exactly the same spot lol. what finally got me moving again was doing the farnsworth timing thing differently -- i had my character speed at like 15 but word speed at 8 which meant i had too much time between characters to second-guess myself. bumping the word speed up even when it felt too fast actually helped more than i expected. also just be patient with yourself, 13 to 20 took me way longer than 5 to 13 did, thats just kind of how it goes from what i can tell