so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im stuck. like really stuck. i can copy at maybe 7-8wpm on a good day if the sending is clean and the characters are ones i know well but anything faster than that and my brain just turns to mush. i started with the Koch method using the LCWO website and got through all the characters pretty quick actually, got up to about 5wpm no problem. but now it feels like ive hit a wall and i cant figure out if im practicing wrong or just not practicing enough or what.

i do maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. i try to copy QSOs off the air when i can but honestly most of what i hear is either too fast or people using abbreviations i dont recognize yet. a buddy of mine who got his extra back in like 1987 keeps telling me to just increase the character speed and leave the word spacing slow (farnsworth method i think) but i dunno if thats really doing anything for me. does it get easier at some point or is there some specific thing i just should be doing that im not?

the farnsworth thing your buddy mentioned is actually solid advice, dont give up on it. the whole point is to get your brain hearing characters as sounds instead of dashes and dots, and if you slow down the character speed your brain starts counting instead of recognizing. i spent way too long at 13wpm because i kept practicing at a comfortable pace instead of pushing the character speed up even when it hurt.

what really unstuck me was doing what some people call head copy practice - you just listen and dont write anything down, try to get whole words in your head before they fade. sounds counterintuitive but copying by hand was actually slowing me down because i was falling behind and then panicking. once i let go of the pencil things started clicking a lot faster. also just kept the farnsworth spacing wide for a while, like character speed at 20 and word spacing way out at 8 or 10, then slowly brought the word spacing in over a few months. it took probably a year total to get comfortably around 20 but it did happen.

honestly same boat as you were not that long ago lol. what helped me was just listening to a lot of W1AW code practice, they send at like 5 10 13 15 and 20wpm and you can grab the text from the arrl site afterward to check yourself. something about knowing the answer was available made me less stressed about missing stuff. also i found that 20 mins a day every single day beats doing an hour on saturday and nothing all week, at least for me. the consistency thing is real even when it doesnt feel like youre improving.