so ive been at this for probably 8 months now and i just cannot seem to break through the 13wpm wall. started back in the spring doing the Koch method on LCWO and got up to about 13 pretty quickly but now its like my brain just stops working above that speed. im copying maybe 70% at 13 but the moment i bump it up to 15 i fall apart completely.

my practice routine right now is maybe 20-30 minutes a day with the W1AW code practice files and some random QSO text on LCWO. i know people say you gotta just push through and copy what you can but it feels like im spinning my wheels. wondering if anyone else hit this same wall and what actually helped you get moving again. id really love to be able to ragchew at 20wpm someday, feels so far away right now.

oh man yes i hit that exact same wall around 12-13wpm and it lasted embarrassingly long. what finally broke it for me was switching to head copy instead of writing everything down. i know that sounds scary but the act of writing was actually slowing my brain down - i was spending so much mental energy on the pencil that i wasnt actually processing the code properly.

what i did was just sit and listen to the W1AW practice at like 15wpm and just try to understand words, not copy every single letter. some days i barely got anything but after a few weeks my brain started chunking whole words together instead of individual letters and then things just clicked. also honestly make sure youre not burning out - 20-30 mins is fine but some people push too hard and then their brain just stops absorbing. take a day off here and there, it actually helps more than grinding through it.

same boat here, im at like 11wpm and 20 feels like a fantasy lol. but one thing my elmer told me that helped a little is to keep the character speed high even when youre starting out - like 20wpm character speed with extra spacing between them (farnsworth method i think its called). that way your brain already knows what fast characters sound like and youre just working on the spacing. not sure if that helps at the stage youre at but figured id mention it