so ive been doing CW practice for about 3 months now and im stuck around 13-14wpm and it feels like i hit a wall. when i started i was doing the Koch method using LCWO and honestly the jump from 5 to about 10wpm felt pretty natural, like it just clicked after a few weeks of daily practice. but now im sitting here every morning with my coffee doing 20 minute sessions and i feel like im not moving at all.

i know the standard advice is just keep at it and dont try to copy every single character, more of a flow thing. but i'm curious how long it actually took people to get to 20wpm comfortably. not contest speed or anything, just solid ragchew speed where you're not sweating every letter. and does anyone have a specific thing that actually helped them break through a plateau like this, a different tool, a different approach, something

the plateau around 13-15 wpm is basically a rite of passage, almost everyone hits it there. what got me through it was switching from LCWO to just listening to actual QSOs on 40 meters with a receiver and trying to copy without any pressure. no grade, no score, just real traffic. the thing about generated practice code is you subconsiously know the rhythm is going to be perfect and clean, real ops are sloppy and that actually forces your brain to work harder and adapt faster. took me probably another 2 months of doing that alongside my regular LCWO sessions before i was sitting comfortably at 18-20wpm. also one thing -- are you still trying to think of letters or are you hearing whole words? because if youre still going letter by letter at 14wpm thats probably your bottleneck right there. once words start coming as single sounds instead of sequences of dits and dahs it changes everything.

honestly i went through the exact same thing last year around the same speed. what helped me weirdly was just bumping the character speed up way past where i was comfortable -- like setting LCWO to 20wpm character speed even though i couldnt really keep up -- and just letting myself miss stuff. at first i felt like i was getting nowhere cause my copy was terrible but after a few weeks something started to click and i wasnt sounding out letters anymore. i think my brain just kind of gave up trying to decode dits and dahs and started learning the sounds as whole characters. took maybe 6 weeks before i noticed a real differnece. also just being patient with yourself, 3 months is not that long for this stuff