so ive been at this for about 4 months now and i started with the Koch method at 5wpm which honestly felt fine, got all the characters down pretty quick and was feeling good about myself. then i pushed up to 10 and it got harder but manageable. now im sitting here stuck around 10-12wpm and 20 just seems like some mythical thing that only people who were born in 1950 can do lol

i practice with the LCWO website mostly, like 20-30 minutes a day which i know maybe isnt enough but thats what i can fit in. i can copy single characters okay but actual words just fall apart on me especially if theres a long word or my brain hiccups on one letter and then i lose the next three trying to recover. does that ever stop happening or is it just part of it forever

also i read somewhere that you should practice at a higher character speed even if your overall word speed is slower — like the farnsworth method or whatever its called. anyone actually do that and did it help or is it just one of those things people say on the internet

oh man that recovery thing after missing a letter drove me absolutely crazy for like a year. the trick that actually helped me was just... letting it go. sounds dumb but i used to freeze up when i missed something and then id miss the next 5 characters panicking. eventually i just trained myself to drop it and move on and my overall copy actually went up because of it.

and yes the farnsworth spacing is real and it works, at least it did for me. i ran characters at like 18-20wpm character speed with extra spacing between them so i wasnt using that slow dit-dah rhythm that gets burned into your head at 5wpm. thats the thing people dont always say — if you learn your characters at 5wpm char speed you end up counting dits and dahs instead of hearing the sound as a whole character, and then when you speed up it all falls apart because you cant count fast enough anymore. Farnsworth basically forces your brain to hear the character as a shape rather than individual elements.

30 minutes a day is fine honestly, consistency beats marathon sessions. just keep showing up.

im in basically the same spot as you so take this for what its worth but i started mixing in actual QSO recordings from places like the CW operators site and it helped more than any of the random character drills. hearing real people send real exchanges with real timing somehow clicked different in my brain than the computer generated stuff. plus it made it feel like something i might actually do someday instead of just a weird typing exercise haha