so ive been at this for a while now, started learning morse back in the spring and got up to about 13wpm pretty quickly using the Koch method and just hammering away at it every day. felt great at first, like i was actually making progress and could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

but now its been probably 3 months and i just cant seem to break through to the next level. im doing 30-45 minutes a day with lcwo.net and sometimes Just Learn Morse Code on my laptop. i can copy clean text okay at 13 but as soon as i push it to 15 everything falls apart and i lose the whole sentence trying to figure out one letter i missed.

anyone else hit this wall and figure out how to get through it? id really like to get to 20wpm eventually, i know people say thats where it really clicks and you stop counting dits and dahs. starting to wonder if im doing something wrong or if this is just how it works.

yeah that plateau around 12-14 wpm is super common, almost everybody hits it. what helped me more than anything was just... stop trying to be perfect. i used to pause and really think about each letter and that was actually slowing me down. the goal at that stage is to stop processing individual elements and start hearing whole letters and eventually whole words as sounds, kind of like how you recognize a word when someone says it out loud without thinking about the individual letters.

one thing that really worked for me was bumping the character speed way up, like 20wpm character speed but only 10wpm effective speed (farnsworth timing), so your ear gets used to what letters actually sound like at higher speeds even if theres extra space between them. then you gradually reduce the spacing over time. took me maybe 6 weeks of doing that before 15wpm started feeling comfortable. also try copying common words as whole units, words like THE and AND and IS your brain will start to recognize instantly without decoding. stick with it, the 13-15 wall is real but its not permanent.

im kind of in the same boat honestly, maybe a little behind you at around 10-11wpm. but i heard the same advice about farnsworth and started doing that a few weeks ago and i think its helping, hard to tell yet. one thing i started doing that feels good is just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when i can only catch maybe half of what theyre saying. like just having real morse in my ears instead of computer generated practice text. W1AW sends practice broadcasts too at different speeds if you dont already know about that.