so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-12wpm and it feels like hitting a wall. when i started i was doing the koch method with just two characters and that worked great, got up to 5wpm pretty quick and felt good about it. but somewhere around 10 it just... stopped feeling like progress?

im using lcwo.net most days, maybe 15-20 minutes in the morning before work. i know people say consistency matters more than long sessions and i think ive been pretty good about that. but the plateau is real and i dont know if im doing something wrong or if this is just how it goes for everyone.

my main issue is i still sometimes hear a letter and have to think about it for half a second before i copy it, and by then ive missed the next one. with easy common letters like E and T im fine but something like X or Q and my brain just locks up. anyone been through this and got out the other side? how long did it realistically take you to get comfortable at 20wpm, not just technically able to do it but actually comfortable receiving in a QSO?

oh man the 10-12wpm plateau is SO real, i spent like 3 months stuck right there and almost quit honestly. what finally broke it for me was two things — first i bumped my character speed way up on lcwo, like to 18 or even 20wpm, but dropped the overall word speed way down so there was more space between characters. the idea being you train your ear to hear the letters as sounds not dots and dashes. second thing was i started just listening to actual on-air CW even when i couldnt copy it, just having it on in the background while doing other stuff. not sure if that really did anything scientifically but it felt like it helped me get used to the rhythm.

as for how long to 20wpm... i wont lie to you, for me it was probably close to 18 months of pretty regular practice before i felt genuinely comfortable in a real QSO at that speed. some guys do it faster. i know one guy who went from zero to 20 in like 8 months but he was practicing an hour a day minimum so thats just a different commitment level. the X and Q thing you mentioned goes away, just takes repetition, those letters start sounding like whole sounds eventually instead of a puzzle you have to decode.

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you, little further along maybe, sitting around 14wpm now. one thing that helped me a lot was switching to copying actual words and callsigns instead of random letters. random character groups are brutal because your brain gets no context clues at all. real words you start to anticipate and that helps a ton. there are some good head copy exercises on youtube too if you havent tried those, just search for morse code head copy drills and a few good channels come up.