so ive been at this for about 4 months now. started at 5wpm with the Koch method and honestly that part wasnt too bad, i was making decent progress every week and felt pretty good about it. but somewhere around 8-10wpm things just kind of stalled out and i feel like im not getting any better no matter how much i practice.

my routine right now is about 20-30 minutes a day on the computer, mostly using the LCWO website which has been great but im starting to wonder if i need to mix things up. i can copy most characters pretty reliably when they come one at a time but as soon as im trying to copy whole words at speed my brain just falls apart. like i can hear the dit dah pattern and i KNOW what the letter is but by the time ive thought about it the next letter is already gone and then im behind and everything goes sideways from there.

my goal is 20wpm eventually, mostly because i want to start doing some CW contesting and maybe chase some DX. anybody been through this same plateau and figure out a way through it? feel like im missing something obvious

yeah that exact thing happened to me, the 10wpm wall is real and pretty much everyone hits it. what you're describing with knowing the letter but thinking about it too long — that's the whole problem right there. you're still decoding instead of just hearing. took me forever to figure out that you have to kind of give up on consciously identifying each character and let your brain do it automatically, which sounds easy but really isnt.

what actually worked for me was two things. first i bumped my character speed up to like 15 or even 18wpm but kept the word spacing slow, so farnsworth timing basically. forces you to hear characters as sounds not as patterns you count. second thing was i stopped practicing random letter groups and switched almost entirely to real words and QSO text. your brain is way better at anticipating real language than random strings, and that anticipation is part of how fast operators actually work. give it another few weeks at higher character speed and i promise something will click

I'm kind of in the same boat as you actually, hovering around 12wpm and it feels like treading water. But one thing that helped me a little bit was just listening to actual on-air QSOs even when I can only catch maybe half of it. there's something different about hearing real operators versus the computer generated stuff, the rhythm feels more natural somehow. W1AW practice sessions are good for this too since they do different speeds. Anyway not sure if that helps but you're definitely not alone in finding this part frustrating