so ive been at this for about 8 months now and honestly the first few months were great, went from barely copying anything to around 10-12wpm pretty smoothly. started with the Koch method on the lcwo website and it felt like things were clicking. but now im just... stuck. im sitting around 13wpm and every time i try to push to 15 it falls apart. i get a letter wrong and then my brain kind of freezes trying to figure out what i missed and then i miss the next three letters too and its just a cascade of failure lol

my practice routine is pretty much just lcwo for 15-20 minutes in the morning before work, sometimes i listen to actual qso traffic on 40m in the evenings. someone at my club told me i should be doing longer sessions but honestly i dont have the time and also i read somewhere that short focused sessions are actually better? idk

anyone been through this and gotten past it? what actually worked for you. im not in a huge rush but it would be nice to actually use cw on the air without feeling like im going to panic the moment someone sends faster than i expect

oh man yeah that 13-15wpm plateau is SO real, almost everyone hits it. what helped me more than anything was just forcing myself to copy real qsos even when i could only get maybe 60% of it. the thing is your brain starts to fill in the gaps using context after a while, like if you heard 'tnx fer the qso ur 599 in' you dont actually need to copy every single character perfectly to know whats coming next. took me a while to trust that process but it works.

also dont underestimate just listening passively while youre doing something else, dishes, driving whatever. i had cw trainer on my phone playing random words at like 18wpm for weeks just as background noise and i think it helped my ear get used to the rhythm even when i wasnt actively trying to copy. the short sessions thing is legit by the way, 20 focused minutes beats an hour of half-paying-attention practice every time in my experience

im kind of in the same boat actually, stuck around 12wpm for the past couple months. one thing i tried recently is bumping the character speed up to like 20wpm but keeping the overall word speed lower (farnsworth method i think its called) so you get used to hearing the actual dit dah patterns at speed even if theres more space between characters. feels weird at first but supposedly it prevents you from counting dits and dahs which is a bad habit that catches up with you later. havent broken through yet but it feels like im building the right muscle memory at least