so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im sitting at somewhere around 10-11wpm depending on the day and how tired i am. started with the Koch method using lcwo.net back in january and honestly the first couple months felt like nothing was happening and then suddenly i could copy most of what i was hearing which was cool.

the thing im struggling with now is that plateau between like 10 and 15wpm. i can hear individual characters fine but when it speeds up a little my brain just kind of freezes and i fall behind and then i lose the whole thing. ive been doing about 20-30 minutes a day on the site and also listening to W1AW practice transmissions when i can catch them.

curious how long it took people to get to 20wpm and if there was anything specific that actually helped versus stuff that sounded good but didnt really do much. also wondering if i should just be doing more time per day or if its more about what kind of practice im doing

that 10-15 range is genuinely the hardest part for most people, you're not alone there. what helped me was forcing myself to just listen and not write anything down for a while. i know that sounds counterintuitive but when you're trying to write every letter you're still kind of spelling things out in your head instead of hearing words as whole units. took me a while to trust it but once i stopped transcribing everything and just tried to get the meaning the speed started to come more naturally.

also the farnsworth method thing where you hear characters at full speed but with longer gaps between them - if youre not already doing that i'd start there. lcwo lets you set character speed and effective speed separately. bump the character speed up to like 18-20 even if your effective wpm stays where you are. your ear gets used to what fast code actually sounds like and then closing the gap isnt as big a jump. took me probably another 3-4 months to go from 12 to 20 comfortably but i wasnt practicing every day either so your mileage may vary.

honestly just get on the air. i know that sounds scary when you feel like youre not ready but even just calling CQ slowly and having a real QSO where you have to copy in real time with no rewind button did more for me in two weeks than months of practice software. the adrenaline or whatever it is makes your brain pay attention differently. check out the slow speed nets like the slow net on 3.530 or the SKCC stuff, people there are super patient and expect people to be learning.