so ive been at this for about three months now and i feel like im completely stuck. started learning morse for my extra class but honestly i just got hooked on it and want to actually use it on the air someday. right now i can copy maybe 5wpm if everything is perfect and the guy sending is super clean, but anything faster and my brain just turns to mush.

ive been using the LC Koch method on the LCWO website which seems fine but i dont know if im doing something wrong or just not practicing enough. i do maybe 20 minutes a day usually before work. read somewhere that you shouldnt practice more than like 30 mins at a stretch which i try to stick to. my character speed is set to 20wpm with farnsworth spacing which is what everyone says to do but man it still feels really slow going.

is there like a point where it just clicks? i keep waiting for that moment people talk about where it stops being decode-one-letter-at-a-time and starts sounding like words. anyone been through this and come out the other side copying 20wpm comfortably?

yeah that click moment is real, it took me probably 6 months before i felt it happening. the thing that made the biggest difference for me wasnt more practice time, it was changing what i was practicing with. LCWO is great for characters but at some point you gotta start copying actual QSOs, even if you can only get every third word. i started recording stuff off the Morse Code Ninja youtube channel, he has word lists at different speeds and that helped a ton.

also and this is going to sound weird but copying by hand was slowing me down. switching to typing what i heard sped things up noticeably, i think because writing is slower and i'd fall behind and then panic. maybe try that if you havent. 20 minutes a day is probably fine but consistency matters more than duration, missing days is what kills progress in my experience.

im sort of in the same boat as you honestly so take this with a grain of salt but one thing my elmer told me was to make sure youre listening to stuff at the speed you WANT to be at, not just where you're comfortable. like if you only ever listen at 5wpm your brain just gets used to 5wpm. he had me listening to 15wpm stuff even when i could barely get 10% of it, just to get my ear used to the rhythm. seemed crazy at first but i think its working? im up to about 12wpm now copying solid copy so something is going right.