so ive been doing morse code practice for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 8-9wpm and honestly its starting to feel like a wall. when i first started i went from basically nothing to 5wpm pretty fast, felt good, thought this was gonna be easy. then from 5 to where i am now took forever and i feel like im not making progress anymore even though im practicing every day for like 20-30 minutes.

i'm using the lcwo.net site and also occasionally just listening to W1AW practice sessions. somebody told me i should be using the koch method and setting my character speed higher than my overall speed — like 20wpm characters but 5wpm spacing or whatever — is that actually how people do it? i tried it and it feels completely alien, like my brain just cant keep up.

anyway just curious how long it realistically took people to get to 20wpm because right now that number feels like a fantasy. also wondering if theres a point where it just clicks and you start hearing whole words instead of individual letters

the farnsworth method you're describing (fast characters, slow spacing) is genuinely the right way to do it, even though yeah it feels weird at first. the whole point is you're training your brain to hear each character as a sound rather than counting dits and dahs. if you learn at slow character speeds you end up having to relearn everything later which is a pain.

for timeline — honestly it varies a lot. i went from zero to passing the old 13wpm test in about 8 months of pretty casual practice, maybe 15 minutes a day. but i've seen people do it faster and slower. the wall you're hitting around 8-9 is super common, a lot of people call it the code plateau. what helped me break through it was just doing more actual on-air qsos even when i felt like i wasnt ready. copying live signals is totally different from practice tapes and it forces your brain to work harder. try 40m around 7.050 or so, there's usually slow cw activity and people are generally patient with beginners.

and yes there absolutely is a point where words just start coming through as words. you'll know when it happens, it's kind of a weird moment.

im in basically the same boat as you lol, been at it since january and i hover around 10wpm on a good day. what i noticed is that taking a day or two off sometimes helps more than grinding through it — like my brain consolidates stuff while im not actively practicing or something. probably sounds like an excuse to be lazy but it genuinely seems to work for me at least