so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11 wpm and it feels like a wall. i started with the Koch method using LCWO and got through all the characters pretty quick but now the speed building part is just... brutal. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know isnt a ton but its what i can fit in.

my main problem is i still have to think about some of the letters, like the less common ones Q and Z and Y, my brain just doesn't fire fast enough on those. everything else is getting better but those stragglers slow me down because i hesitate and then i lose the next character while im still processing the last one.

i guess my question is for people who made it to 20wpm — how long did it take, was there a point where it just clicked, and did you do anything different that actually worked. ive read a bunch of the usual advice but hearing real experiences would help. also wondering if i should just push the speed up and struggle through it or stay at a comfortable speed longer

the wall you're hitting around 10-11 is totally real and almost everybody goes through it. what helped me more than anything was switching to Farnsworth timing — keep the character speed up high, like 20wpm characters, but stretch the spacing out so you have more time between them. that way your brain gets trained to hear the characters at actual speed from the start instead of having to re-learn them later. LCWO lets you set it that way if you havent already messed with those settings.

for those stubborn letters, honestly the best thing i did was just make a short daily drill of just those problem characters over and over until they became automatic. like five minutes of nothing but Q Z Y X mixed in. boring but it worked.

as for timeline — it took me almost a year to get solid at 20wpm and i was practicing more than you are. but i also had stretches where i barely touched it. dont get discouraged, the progress is real even when it doesnt feel like it. just keep showing up every day even if its only 15 minutes

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been grinding away at this for about 6 months. one thing that helped me a lot was listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i can only catch maybe half of it. theres something about real morse with real operators that trains your ear differently than practice software. 40 meters in the morning has a lot of slower ragchew type stuff if you hunt around.

oh and head copy is huge. i was writing everything down and i think that was actually slowing me down because my brain was focused on the pen not the sound. forced myself to just listen and it was painful at first but after a couple weeks something shifted a little. still not at 20 but im closer than i was