so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck. started learning morse back in the spring mostly just to see if i could do it, and i got up to around 5wpm pretty comfortably with the Koch method and a few of the apps. felt great. then i hit this wall somewhere around 8-10wpm where i just... stopped improving. like the characters still sound like individual dits and dahs to me instead of one whole sound, if that makes sense.

i know the standard advice is to just listen listen listen and not try to write everything down, but honestly i dont know if im doing that right either. been using the LCWO site and some of the RufzXP practice but my brain just freezes when the speed bumps up. i see people saying they went from nothing to 20wpm in like 6 months and i have no idea how thats possible.

did anyone here actually go through this grind and come out the other side? whats the thing that finally clicked for you? im not in a hurry or anything, just want to make sure im not practicing wrong and burning time doing the same thing over and over.

yeah that plateau around 8-10wpm is super common, almost everyone hits it. the thing that finally broke through it for me was forcing myself to copy by head instead of writing. like i literally put the pencil down and just sat there listening. at first it felt like i was retaining nothing but after a few weeks chunks of words started sticking. the brain kind of has to rewire how it processes the sounds and you cant rush it, it just takes repetition at slightly uncomfortable speeds.

i used the Just Learn Morse Code software and set it so the character speed was 20wpm but with extra spacing between characters — thats the Farnsworth method if youre not familiar. keeps you from learning the rhythms at slow speed which is a trap a lot of people fall into. when i finally closed the gap and removed the extra spacing everything kind of snapped into place. took me maybe another 3 or 4 months to feel solid at 15wpm after that. 20 came not too long after once i started getting on the air and doing actual QSOs, real contacts are way better practice than any software honestly.

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but one thing that helped me a little was doing the G4FON trainer and just running it every morning for like 15 minutes instead of these long marathon sessions. i read somewhere that shorter more frequent practice beats long occasional sessions for this kind of memory stuff. no idea if thats scientifically true but it seemed to help me anyway. still not at 20 myself so maybe dont listen to me lol