so ive been trying to learn morse code for about 4 months now and im completely stuck at 5wpm. i can copy pretty reliably at that speed if i sit down and really concentrate but the moment i try to push it even a little bit everything falls apart. i know the characters, i can recognize all of them, but at 7 or 8wpm my brain just kind of freezes up and i start falling behind and then i panic and miss the next character and it just snowballs.

ive been using the lcwo website and doing the Koch method but i feel like im just going in circles. somebody at my club mentioned farnsworth timing which i sort of understand but not really sure if im doing it right. been at this for months and honestly starting to wonder if im just not cut out for this. anybody go through something similar and actually come out the other side at like 20wpm?

oh man yes I went through exactly this and it took me way longer than I expected to be honest. the thing that finally clicked for me was stopping trying to consciously translate the dits and dahs into letters and just... letting the sound become the letter directly. easier said than done i know but the way i got there was basically just listening to a LOT of code without worrying about copying it. like put on W1AW practice transmissions or something from the ARRL audio files and just let it wash over you while you're doing dishes or whatever.

also the Farnsworth thing - what it does is send the individual characters at a higher speed like 15 or 18wpm but puts longer gaps between them so you have time to process. the idea is you train your ear to hear the letters as sounds not as counted dits and dahs, but you still get the extra thinking time. slowly you shrink the gap. lcwo does this if you set the character speed higher than the overall speed. i went from about 5 to 12 that way over maybe 6 months of pretty regular practice, then 12 to 20 took another year but it came faster once i started actually getting on the air and doing it for real.

dont give up, im in the same boat right now kind of. just hit 10wpm last week after being stuck at 7 forever. what helped me was just shorter sessions more often instead of long ones. like 15 minutes twice a day beats an hour once a day for me anyway. also just started doing actual QSOs on 40m with the slow speed nets and that is way more fun than just staring at lcwo scores, even though im still pretty rough at it