so ive been at this CW thing for about three months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and honestly its starting to feel like a wall. when i first started i was using the Koch method with LCWO and made really fast progress from zero up to around 5-6wpm, felt great, but now the gains have really slowed down and im wondering if im doing something wrong or if this is just... normal.

my practice routine is roughly 20-30 minutes a day, mostly just doing the LCWO lessons and sometimes listening to QSOs on 40m which i can barely follow at all honestly. someone at my local club told me i should be sending more, not just receiving, but i only have a straight key and my fist is pretty terrible so i feel like im reinforcing bad habits. not sure if i should get a paddle or just push through with the straight key for now.

for those of you who went through this process — how long did it realistically take to get to 20wpm, and was there a specific thing that clicked for you or did it just gradually happen over time?

that plateau around 8-10wpm is super common, almost everyone hits it. what happens is below that speed your brain is still decoding letter by letter and it works okay, but to get faster you have to start hearing whole words as sounds instead of individual dits and dahs strung together. its a mental shift more than a physical one and it takes time to happen.

the thing that helped me most was the Farnsworth method — basically you set your character speed high (like 20wpm) but with extra spacing between characters so you have time to think. LCWO does this, just crank the character speed up to 20 and drop the effective speed down to whatever you can handle. forces your brain to learn the sounds at actual speed even if the overall pace is slow. i went from about 8wpm to comfortable 15wpm in maybe 4-5 months doing 20-25 min a day, then 20wpm took another 6 months or so but i wasnt being super consistent.

also get a paddle. seriously. not that a straight key is wrong but a decent iambic paddle with your keyer set up right will make sending a lot more pleasant and youll actually want to practice sending more. i use a cheap Bencher clone i found at a hamfest and its been fine for years.

honestly i'm kind of in the same boat as you so i cant give you a success story yet lol but i did read somewhere that listening to code you cant quite follow is actually good practice even if it feels useless — something about your brain picking up patterns subconsciously. i've been leaving a CW net playing in the background sometimes while i do other stuff, no idea if it actually helps but it doesnt hurt i guess.

one thing that did help me a bit was Just Learn Morse Code software, has some good word recognition drills which are different from the character drills on LCWO. variety seems to help keep my brain from going on autopilot.