so ive been plugging away at morse code for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 7-8 wpm and it feels like the wall is real. i started with the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and got through all the characters pretty quick but now actually copying at speed is just... not happening the way i expected.

im doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i know probably isnt enough but thats what i got. mostly using the trainer and sometimes listening to W1AW code practice on 40m. my sending is actually not bad i think but copying is where i fall apart, especially when its a word i dont recognize right away and then i miss the next two characters while my brain is still stuck on the first one.

anyway i guess im asking — for people who actually got to 20wpm or beyond, how long did it realistically take from being a total beginner, and is there anything that actually worked for you other than just grinding hours. i keep reading about word recognition vs individual characters and honestly im not sure i fully understand the difference in practice.

honest answer — it took me about 18 months from zero to solid 20wpm copying in real QSOs, but i wasnt super consistent about practice either. the thing that helped me most was switching from copying every letter to just writing down whole words when i caught them and letting the rest go. sounds wrong but it trains your brain to stop panicking about missed characters.

also the Farnsworth method if you havent tried it — basically the characters come at 20wpm speed but with longer gaps between them. so your brain learns the sound of each character at the target speed without you having to process them that fast in a row. G4FON does this. i ran characters at 20 and spacing at 10 for a long time and it really did help the transition feel less brutal. the plateau you're hitting around 8 is super common, a lot of people call it the 10wpm wall even though it hits different for everyone. just keep going honestly.

just chiming in cause im in basically the same boat, sitting at about 9wpm right now and have been for like two months lol. one thing i started doing recently that seems to help is listening to the LCWO website head copy exercises — you dont write anything down, just listen and try to understand it like spoken language. feels weird at first but i think its starting to click a little bit. still slow but maybe worth trying if you havent already.