so ive been working on my morse code for about a year now, started from basically zero and got up to around 13wpm which felt great at the time but now i just cant seem to push past it. like i'll be copying along fine and then i hit a word i dont recognize instantly and my whole brain just locks up and i fall behind and then i'm lost for the next 30 seconds trying to catch up.

i've been using the LCWO site mostly, some jt65 ops in my club told me to just listen to actual QSOs on 40m but honestly i can barely make out what people are sending at that speed. somebody else told me i need to do the Koch method properly but i thought i was already doing that? not sure what im doing wrong or if this is just a plateau everyone hits. did anyone else get stuck around here and actually make it through to 20wpm? curious how long it took and what actually worked

yeah that 13-15wpm wall is super common, almost everyone hits it. what's happening is you're still sounding out some letters in your head instead of just hearing the whole word as a chunk. the jump from 13 to 20 is less about raw speed and more about switching from letter-by-letter to word recognition, which is a completely different mental process and honestly kind of has to be relearned from scratch.

what helped me was setting my character speed way higher than my overall speed, like 20wpm characters but with extra spacing between them so the overall pace is slow enough to copy. Farnsworth spacing its called. you train your ear to hear the characters at full speed but you give yourself time to write it down. then you gradually close that gap. took me maybe 4 or 5 months of pretty consistent daily practice, maybe 20 minutes a day. also just listening to W1AW bulletin code practice on shortwave even if you cant copy it all, just having it on in the background while you do other stuff around the shack seems to help your brain absorb the rhythm without you even trying

im in almost the exact same spot lol so no real advice but just wanted to say youre not alone. i tried bumping up to 15wpm on LCWO last week and it was pretty rough. gonna try that farnsworth thing the other guy mentioned, hadnt heard of that before actually