so ive been at this for about 8 months now and hit a wall i cant seem to get through. started learning CW back in the spring, got to about 13wpm pretty comfortably and now everything just kinda stalled out. i can copy most letters fine but when the speed goes up my brain just stops and i start trying to sound out individual dits and dahs again instead of hearing the whole character as one sound, which i know is the wrong approach but its hard to break the habit once the speed goes up.

i use the G4FON trainer mostly, been doing about 20 minutes a day. some days i do the LCWO site too. the problem is i feel like ive been at 13-14wpm for like 2 months and i genuinely dont know if im doing something wrong or if this is just a normal plateau and i need to push through it somehow. did anyone else hit this same wall around this speed? how did you get past it? i dont want to give up on 20wpm, thats always been the goal for me since i started.

oh man yes i hit that exact same wall, right around 13-14wpm, its like running into a glass door. what finally worked for me was something my elmer told me which felt counterintuitive at first — he said stop practicing at the speed youre comfortable at and force yourself to copy at 18 or even 20wpm even if you only get maybe 40 or 50 percent of it. the idea is youre training your ear to hear characters as sounds instead of sequences. took me a few weeks of feeling really frustrated and dumb before things started clicking but once they did i jumped pretty fast.

also the Farnsworth method is good but honestly i think a lot of people lean on it too long. if you're doing farnsworth at like 20wpm character speed with 13wpm word speed, try bumping the overall speed up even when it feels uncomfortable. your brain will catch up. takes longer than youd want but it does happen. and get on the air and just listen to actual QSOs even if you cant copy em fully, real code has a different feel than computer generated stuff.

im kind of in the same boat actually so watching this thread. im at about 11wpm right now and already dreading hitting that plateau everyone talks about. one thing i read somewhere was to try copying without writing anything down, just listen and try to retain words in your head, supposed to help break the habit of decoding letter by letter. havent tried it long enough to know if it works tbh.