so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im just not breaking through. i can copy at maybe 5wpm on a good day if the sending is clean and i know the word is coming but anything faster and my brain just locks up completely. i know people say dont count dits and dahs and learn the sounds but honestly i still catch myself doing it sometimes without even realizing it.

ive been using the lcwo.net lessons and im on lesson like 22 or something, doing the koch method. i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i read is supposed to be enough. but progress feels really slow. did anyone else hit this wall around here and what actually got you through it. im starting to wonder if some people just arent wired for it or something

oh man i remember this feeling exactly. i was stuck around 6-7wpm for what felt like forever and thought the same thing, like maybe my brain just doesnt work this way. what finally cracked it open for me was two things. first i stopped worrying about copying every single character and just let myself miss some. like actively told myself its okay to miss a letter, just keep listening. before that i was basically panicking every time i missed something and then id miss the next three characters too while i was still stressed about the first one.

second thing was i started listening to actual qsos on the air instead of just practice files. even if i couldnt copy it all, just hearing the rhythm of real contacts doing real exchanges helped a lot. w1aw broadcasts are good for this too. the characters in practice files can sound a little sterile compared to real sending. anyway stick with it, 4 months isnt that long honestly, some people take a year or more to get comfortable and thats fine

yeah dont give up. one thing nobody told me when i was learning was to set your character speed higher than your overall speed in lcwo. so like run characters at 20wpm but only 5 or 6wpm effective speed with the farnsworth spacing. your brain learns the actual sound of each letter at speed instead of counting, then you just gradually close up the spacing over time. made a huge difference for me once i switched to doing it that way