so ive been at this for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months felt great, went from barely recognizing the letters to copying pretty solid at 5wpm and then 8wpm. but somewhere around 10-12wpm things just kind of... stalled. like i can still copy if the letters come slow enough but the moment it speeds up even a little bit my brain just locks up and i start trying to count dits and dahs again which i know is totally the wrong approach.

ive been using the Koch method on and off but i got impatient and jumped ahead too fast i think. someone at my local club told me i need to just listen to a lot of high speed code even if i cant copy it, kind of like immersion? not sure if thats actually true or just one of those things people say. also using LCWO and doing about 20 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. is that enough? should i be doing more sessions but shorter? really not sure what the right approach is here and its a little discouraging when i see guys on the air rattling off 25wpm like its nothing.

any advice from people who have actually been through this plateau would be really appreciated. de KB3MXQ

oh man the plateau around 10-12wpm is so real, pretty much everyone hits it and its the point where a lot of people give up which is a shame. what you described about going back to counting dits and dahs is exactly the problem — your brain hasnt fully made the jump to hearing letters and words as whole sounds yet, its still in decode mode.

the immersion thing your club guy mentioned actually does have some merit but its not a magic fix on its own. what really helped me break through was a combination of things — i dropped my practice speed back down to where i was comfortable, like 90% copy, and held there way longer than felt necessary. also started doing word drills instead of random letters, common words like "the" "and" "de" "rst" just repeat over and over until they feel like a single sound not a string of characters. and honestly the biggest thing for me was just getting on the air even when i felt not ready. QRS net on 40m was huge for me, real contacts feel completely different from LCWO and your brain kicks into gear in a weird way. give yourself more time, 8 months is nothing in CW world, some guys take 2-3 years to get comfortable at 20wpm.

im kind of in the same boat actually, sitting around 13wpm right now and its frustrating. one thing i started doing that seems to help a bit is using the Just Learn Morse Code software with the Farnsworth method where the characters themselves are sent at like 20wpm but with longer gaps between them — the idea being your ears learn to hear fast characters even if you still have time to write. been doing that for about 6 weeks and i feel like its slowly working but i cant say for sure yet. 20 minutes a day sounds about right to me, i read somewhere that shorter focused sessions beat marathon cramming for this kind of thing.