so ive been at this morse code thing for about 3 months now and im stuck somewhere around 5-6wpm. i can copy most characters fine if i think about them but as soon as things speed up my brain just freezes. i know everyone says dont count dits and dahs and i feel like im not doing that anymore but something is still not clicking when i push past maybe 8wpm.

i use the lcwo website mostly and do some sessions on the morserunner thing for simulated qsos. probably doing 20-30 minutes a day which i read is better than marathon sessions. my goal is to get to 20wpm eventually, i want to be able to do actual dx contacts on cw without feeling like a complete idiot. just curious how long it realistically took people to get there and if there was some specific thing that helped it finally click. feels like im banging my head against a wall lately

honestly the jump from 5 to about 12 felt slow and then something weird happened around 12-13wpm where it started feeling more natural. took me probably 8 months of the kind of practice you're describing before i was comfortable around 18-20wpm. the thing that helped me most was raising my character speed way up, like to 20wpm, but keeping the word spacing slow - thats the farnsworth method and lcwo supports it. forces your brain to hear the whole character as a sound instead of counting. also i stopped trying to write everything down and started just listening and typing on a keyboard, felt less pressure somehow.

dont get discouraged at 5-6wpm though, nearly everyone stalls out somewhere in that 6-10 range before it clicks. just keep showing up every day even if some sessions feel useless

im in basically the same boat lol, sitting at around 7wpm right now. one thing somebody told me on here a while back was to listen to actual qsos on the air even if you can only catch maybe every 5th word. just tune around 40m in the evenings around 7025-7050 and listen. something about hearing real signals vs computer generated tones apparently helps a lot. havent been doing it long enough to say if its working for me yet but figured id pass it along