so ive been at this for about eight months now and when i first started learning CW i was using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and honestly getting to 5wpm felt like climbing everest but then it kind of clicked and i was cruising up through 10, 11, 12wpm no problem. but now im just... stuck. every time i push the speed up past 13 or so i feel like im counting dits and dahs again instead of just hearing the letters as sounds and it's really frustrating because i felt like i had broken through that wall already

ive been doing about 20-30 minutes a day with the trainer and also just listening to W1AW code practice sessions when i can catch them. someone told me i should just crank the speed way up like to 20 or even 25wpm and use farnsworth timing so the characters come fast but there's space between them, but i havent really tried that systematically yet. does that actually work or is it one of those things that sounds good in theory

also i tried doing some actual QSOs on 40m a few weeks ago at about 10wpm and it was a disaster lol, way harder than the practice sessions. the other guy was patient but i still felt terrible about it

the farnsworth thing really does work, and i wish someone had told me to do it from day one instead of two years in. the idea is your brain needs to learn to recognize the characters as whole sounds before it can keep up at speed — if you build muscle memory at slow character rates you basically have to unlearn it later which is painful. so yeah crank the characters up to like 20wpm and use the word spacing to give yourself breathing room, then slowly tighten the spacing over weeks. it feels wrong at first and you'll miss a lot but that's fine, just let the letters you catch register and dont stress about the ones you miss.

the on-air stuff being harder than practice is completely normal by the way. practice recordings are clean, consistent, usually good fists. real operators have their own timing quirks, QRM, fading, all of it. the only fix for that is more on-air time honestly. the 40m slow speed nets are great for this, there's usually one running most evenings and people are genuinely patient with newer ops. just get on and make noise, nobody's judging

im basically in the same boat as you, maybe a little behind actually, so i cant give you expert advice but i did read somewhere that the plateau around 13-15wpm is really common and has something to do with how your brain processes the patterns. like you hit a point where the easy characters are automatic but common words and letter combos arent yet, so you slow back down without realizing it. ive been trying to practice with actual words and sentences instead of random characters lately and it does seem to help a little. also just wanted to say the QSO thing — yeah my first few were rough too, dont sweat it