so ive been at this for about 8 months now. started from literally zero, couldnt even hear the difference between dit and dah at first, and worked my way up pretty slowly using the Koch method through the LCWO website. got to around 13wpm and things were going pretty well, felt like i was actually starting to hear letters as sounds instead of counting dots and dashes in my head which everyone says is the goal right.

but now i feel completely stuck. ive been sitting at 13wpm for like 6 weeks and nothing seems to be moving. i practice every day, usually 20-30 minutes in the morning before work. im doing the code groups on LCWO and also trying to copy some of the slow speed nets on 40m but half the time i miss stuff and get frustrated. read somewhere that you should try practicing at speeds higher than your target to force your brain to adapt but when i crank it up to like 18 or 20wpm i just fall apart completely and cant copy anything useful. is this normal? did anyone else hit a plateau around here and how did you push through it. my goal is 20wpm eventually, not in a huge hurry but want to keep making progress

oh man yes this is extremely normal, almost everyone hits something around 12-15wpm. its kind of a known thing in the CW world. what happens is your brain is in a transition zone between still wanting to count and actually recognizing the whole character as a sound pattern and those two modes kind of fight each other for a while. the good news is once you break through it tends to open up pretty fast.

what helped me a lot was just copying real QSOs instead of code groups. random letter groups are good for training your ear but actual words and phrases give your brain context to fill in gaps when you miss a letter, and you start anticipating common words which speeds things up naturally. also 20-30 minutes a day is fine but some people find shorter sessions more often work better than one longer chunk. and yeah the high speed bursts thing does work but dont try to copy it perfectly, just let it wash over you and grab what you can. after a few weeks of that your comfortable speed starts creeping up almost without you noticing.

im kind of in the same boat, maybe a bit behind you actually, sitting around 10wpm right now. but i heard about this thing called the mirror method or something where you listen to faster code than you can copy and just try to get a word here and there without stressing about the rest. havent tried it long enough to know if it works yet but figured id mention it. also someone told me Just Learn Morse Code app has a word recognition mode thats different from the letter by letter stuff which might help. good luck, hope someone here has better advice than me lol