so ive been at this for about three months now and im stuck somewhere around 9-10wpm and honestly its kind of discouraging. when i first started i was using just.learn morse code app and got to 5wpm pretty fast, felt great, and then hit a wall. a buddy at my club told me to jump straight to copying at 20wpm with farnsworth spacing which i tried for like two weeks and it just felt like chaos honestly.

im wondering how long it realistically took people to get comfortable at 20wpm. i know everyone says just listen listen listen but i feel like im spinning my wheels. doing about 20-30 mins a day. using the lcwo site mostly now. should i be doing more? less? different stuff? also wondering if anyone switched from keyboard copying to paper and noticed a difference because i feel like typing takes my attention off actually hearing the code

three months at 20-30 mins a day and youre already at 9-10wpm, that's actually not bad at all. the jump from 10 to 15 was the hardest part for me personally, took longer than going from 0 to 10. what finally clicked for me was stopping trying to count dits and dahs and just learning to hear whole words as sounds. like the word "the" or "and" just becomes one sound eventually instead of four separate characters.

on the paper vs keyboard thing — yeah switch to paper, at least some of the time. when you type you're thinking about where the keys are and that pulls you out of the flow. paper you just scribble and keep moving even when you miss something, which is important because one of the big skills is learning to not panic when you miss a letter and just catch the next one. also maybe try just listening to actual qso recordings without copying anything sometimes, just let it wash over you. sounds weird but it helped me a lot around the 10wpm stage.

honestly it took me like 8 months to feel solid at 20 but i wasn't that consistent about practicing so take that for what its worth lol. the farnsworth thing is real though, stick with it even when it feels impossible. your brain needs time to stop decoding and start recognizing. i kept a little notebook of words i always missed and drilled just those for a while which helped