so ive been at this for about 8 months now. started with the basic Koch method stuff at 5wpm and honestly the first few months went pretty smooth, picked up characters faster than i expected. got up to around 10-11wpm without too much pain and was feeling pretty good about it.

but somewhere around 12-13wpm everything just kind of... stopped. i can copy fine when im relaxed and its a slow QSO but the moment i try to push the keyer speed up i just fall apart. letters start blurring together and i lose my place and then im just guessing. been stuck here for probably 3 months now and its starting to get frustrating honestly.

im using the LCWO site and also just got the G4FON trainer which people seem to like. i try to practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes more on weekends. is there something specific i should be doing differently to get through this plateau? feels like 20wpm is a million miles away right now

oh man yeah that 12-14wpm plateau is SO real, almost everyone hits it. what you're running into is basically your brain switching from hearing individual dots and dashes to needing to hear whole characters as sounds, and then eventually whole words. its a rewiring thing and it takes time but theres a few things that helped me get unstuck.

first thing, and this is the one most people dont want to hear, is to actually bump your character speed UP even if your overall copying speed stays lower. like set G4FON to send characters at 20wpm but with longer gaps between them (thats basically the Farnsworth method). forces your ears to learn what the letters actually sound like at speed instead of counting dits. took me a couple weeks of that before stuff started clicking again.

also are you writing everything down or trying to copy in your head? at some point you really gotta let go of the pencil and just listen. writing slows your brain down when youre trying to push speed. just my experience anyway, took me probably 4 months of daily practice to get comfortable at 20 and im still not winning any speed contests

I hit basically the same wall last year around that speed and what finally helped me was just... listening to actual QSOs on the air instead of practice software. Like tune around 40 meters in the evenings and just copy whatever you can, even if its only every third word. The rhythm of real operators is just different from computer generated stuff and I think my brain needed that. Also the Just Learn Morse Code software has a word training mode that i thought was kind of gimmicky at first but it actually helped a lot for common words like CQ and 73 and stuff. Anyway dont give up, 20wpm really does come eventually.