so ive been at this for about 8 months now and honestly the progress from 5 to around 12-13 wpm felt pretty natural, like i was just doing my daily sessions with the Koch trainer and things were clicking. but somewhere around 13-14 wpm it just... stopped. i can copy most of the characters fine when i really focus but as soon as i try to bump up the speed even a little it all falls apart and i start missing stuff and then i get in my head about the missed characters and then i miss even more, you know how it goes.

im using the G4FON trainer mostly and doing about 20-30 minutes a day. someone told me to try Farnsworth timing which i did for a while and that helped me learn the characters originally but im not sure its the right tool for where im at now. also been listening to W1AW code practice when i can catch it.

anyone else hit this wall and actually get through it? wondering if im doing something wrong or if this is just one of those things where you have to grind through it

yeah that 13-14 wpm zone is basically a rite of passage, almost everyone stalls out right there. what helped me — and this took a while to accept — was to actually stop worrying about my copy percentage for a while. like just let stuff go by, dont try to write everything down, just listen. your brain needs to start recognizing the sounds as whole words and not as individual dits and dahs, and that transition is uncomfortable because your copy rate temporarily tanks and it feels like you're going backwards.

also, have you tried just listening to actual QSOs on the air even if you cant copy it all? HF propagation willing, 40m has a decent amount of CW traffic in the evenings and even catching a few exchanges here and there does something different for your ear than practice software. the real stuff has a different feel to it, RST exchanges, callsigns, all of it at natural rhythm. took me from stuck-at-14 to solid 18 in maybe 3 months of doing that alongside the software sessions.

im kind of in the same boat so no great advice here but just wanted to say the Farnsworth thing — i think once you're past like 10-12 wpm you probably want to drop it and just run the characters at full speed with shorter spacing. thats what i read anyway. havent fully broken through myself but ive been doing the LCWO website which lets you tweak all that stuff pretty granularly, might be worth trying if youre not already on it. different interface sometimes helps just for keeping things fresh i think