so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck in this weird limbo around 12-13wpm where i can copy most of it but then i lose a word and then i fall behind and suddenly im totally lost. its frustrating because i feel like i was making good progress up until a couple months ago and now it just feels like a wall.

my current routine is about 20 minutes a day with the LCWO site doing the Koch method lessons and then i try to listen to some slow CW on 40m in the evenings but a lot of times i cant find anyone slow enough that isnt a net i dont want to interrupt. been doing this since i passed my general last spring.

curious what actually made the difference for people who got through this plateau. ive heard some people say to just jump up the speed and let your brain catch up, others say dont rush it. i genuinely dont know what to do at this point

the plateau you're describing is super common, like almost everyone hits it somewhere between 10 and 15. what clicked for me was stopping the character-by-character copying and just... listening. i started doing what some people call head copying where you just listen and try to get the gist without writing anything down. felt totally wrong at first, like i wasnt doing any real practice, but after a few weeks my brain started processing whole words instead of individual letters and that was the thing that broke it open for me.

also honestly the jump-to-higher-speed thing has some truth to it. i used to practice at like 15wpm with a 15wpm character speed but then i switched to 20wpm characters with extra spacing between them (farnsworth timing) so my brain had to learn the sounds of the letters at speed even though the overall pace was still manageable. took maybe 3 weeks before things started clicking. LCWO has a farnsworth option if you havent tried it already.

ive been dealing with basically the same thing lol, im at like 11wpm and just falling apart when i miss something. someone told me to just accept the missed characters and keep going instead of trying to go back and figure out what i missed, which sounds obvious but i really wasnt doing that. gonna try the farnsworth thing the other person mentioned too, hadnt heard of that before.