so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-11wpm and it feels like a wall. when i first started it felt like progress was happening pretty fast, went from basically nothing to copying around 5wpm in maybe 3 weeks which felt great. but now its like... i can hear individual letters fine but the moment a word comes at me faster than 12wpm my brain just locks up and i miss the next two letters trying to process the first one.

im using the Koch method mostly, been doing about 20-30 minutes a day with lcwo.net. someone told me i should just crank the speed up to like 20wpm and suffer through it and eventually my brain rewires itself. is that actually true or is it one of those things that sounds good in theory. i dont want to build bad habits if thats even a thing with cw.

also curious how long it actually took people here to get comfortable at 20wpm. not looking for a magic answer just want to know if 4 months in at 10wpm is totally normal or if im doing something wrong

yeah that wall around 10-12wpm is completely real, almost everybody hits it. what you're describing with your brain locking up trying to process one letter while the next one comes in — thats exactly the problem, you're still hearing individual dits and dahs instead of just... hearing the letter as a sound. the jump from character recognition to word recognition is the hard part and honestly it just takes time and repetition.

the advice about cranking the speed up is basically the Farnsworth method idea — you run the characters themselves at a higher speed, like 18-20wpm, but put longer spaces between them so you have time to process. lcwo lets you do this actually, theres a setting for effective speed vs character speed. that way your brain learns the rhythm of a fast E or a fast C from the start instead of building a slow version of it that you have to un-learn later. thats where the bad habits thing comes from, if you learn letters slow they feel different when they speed up.

as for how long, honestly it was probably close to a year before i was comfortable ragchewing at 20wpm without breaking a sweat. but i wasnt practicing every day either. 4 months at 10wpm is completely fine, dont sweat it.

im kind of in the same boat as you, started about 6 months ago and just recently broke through the 13wpm mark which felt huge. one thing that actually helped me a lot besides lcwo was just listening to actual qsos on the air even when i could only catch maybe 30% of it. something about real cw with real fists is different than the computer generated stuff and i think it helped my brain adapt. there are some good websdr frequencies where you can just tune around and listen.

also someone on here recommended just.learn.morse i think its called, or maybe it was morse mania, one of those phone apps where you practice common words instead of random letter strings. once i started doing that my copying speed jumped pretty noticeably because i wasnt processing every letter anymore, just recognizing whole chunks at once. might be worth trying if you havent already