so ive been doing morse code practice for about 3 months now and im stuck around 8-9 wpm and it just feels like im hitting a wall. i started with just the Koch method using the G4FON trainer and it was great at first, letters came pretty quick, but now i feel like im just... treading water i guess. i can copy most characters fine but when i try bumping the speed up even a little i fall apart.

what i really want to know is how long did it realistically take people to get to 20wpm because everything i read online sounds either super encouraging (like 6 weeks) or super discouraging (like years) and i cant tell which is closer to the truth. im putting in maybe 20-30 minutes a day most days. also is there a point where it just kind of clicks and you stop counting dits and just hearing words? because right now i feel like im still processing individual letters and its slow

yeah that plateau around 8-10wpm is super common, pretty much everyone hits it. the thing is at that speed youre probably still sounding out each character in your head instead of just hearing it as a sound pattern. the trick that finally worked for me was forcing myself to copy at a speed where i was maybe getting 60-70% of it right instead of trying to be perfect at a comfortable speed. uncomfortable practice is kind of the whole deal with CW.

also if you havent tried the Farnsworth method where characters are sent at like 20wpm but with extra spacing between them -- that realy helped me stop the habit of counting. took me about 8 months of daily practice to get solidly to 20 but i wasnt super consistent about it either. some weeks id barely touch it. the people who say 6 weeks are probably naturally gifted or already had musical training or something, i wouldnt use that as a benchmark

honestly the click moment is real, it does happen. one day i was copying and i realized i had written down a whole callsign without thinking about any individual letter and it kind of surprised me. hard to say exactly when it happened though.

im not a fast op by any means, maybe 15wpm on a good day, but i found that actually getting on the air helped way more than any trainer software. even just listening to slow CW nets or LCWO practice files of real qso text made a difference because real conversations have like... rhythm and context that random letter groups dont have. your brain starts to predict words and that speeds everything up