so ive been grinding through morse code practice for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-12wpm and it feels like a wall. started with the Koch method back in january using the G4FON trainer and got through all the characters pretty quick but now the speed just wont budge. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know some people say isnt enough but thats honestly all i can squeeze in with work and everything.

my biggest problem is i still catch myself trying to count dits and dahs sometimes, especially under pressure or when im tired, and i know thats the wrong approach but breaking that habit is harder than i expected. someone at my club told me i just need to listen to faster code even if i cant copy it yet and that would help my brain adapt. has anyone actually done that and did it work or is that just something people say

curious how long it realistically took other people to get to 20wpm and what actually helped. im not in a huge rush, just want to actually use cw on the air eventually

that wall around 10-12 wpm is super real, pretty much everybody hits it. what happened for me is i was forming the characters in my head as sounds mapped to letters rather than just hearing the letter directly, and the only thing that actually fixed it was bumping up the character speed in farnsworth mode while keeping the overall pace slower. so like running characters at 18-20wpm but with longer gaps between them so you have time to process. it forces your brain to hear dit-dah as A instead of counting.

the 20-30 min a day thing should be enough honestly, consistency matters more than marathon sessions. i went from about 12 to solid 20 in maybe 4 or 5 months doing similar time. the jump from 15 to 20 was actually easier than the earlier plateaus for me once the characters locked in. also just getting on the air even when youre slow helps a lot, a CWT or something like that where contacts are short, people are patient with slower ops more than you'd think

yeah the listening to faster code thing does actually work, or at least it worked for me. i used to have LCWO running in the background while i was doing other stuff around the house, not even trying to copy it just letting it play. sounds weird but after a few weeks something kind of clicked and the characters started sounding more like sounds than patterns if that makes sense. dont know if thats scientific or whatever but it helped me

also RufzXP if you havent tried it, its a little program for callsign copying and its kind of addictive. speeds up automatically when you get stuff right and slows down when you miss. got me moving faster without really noticing