so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im kind of stuck in the middle. started learning with the Koch method on LCWO and got up to copying all the characters pretty reliably around 5-6 wpm, which felt great at the time. but now im just... stalled. every time i try to push the speed up even a little bit it feels like my brain completely falls apart and i have to slow back down.

i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day most days, sometimes more on weekends. ive been doing a lot of head copy which people keep telling me is the right way to go but honestly some days i feel like im going backwards. my elmer keeps saying just listen to more morse on the air but i tune around and cant really follow actual QSOs yet because they all seem to go so fast even when theyre supposedly slow speed nets.

i guess im just wondering what finally clicked for you if youve gone through this. was there a specific method or resource that made the difference? or did it just sort of happen gradually and i need to be more patient

the plateau you're describing is super common and honestly kind of a rite of passage. i was stuck at 8wpm for almost a year and what finally got me moving again was switching to the Farnsworth method - where the characters themselves are sent at higher speed like 20wpm but the spacing between them is stretched out. LCWO lets you do this, you basically set your character speed way higher than your effective speed. the idea is your brain learns the sound of the whole character instead of counting dots and dashes, and then as you tighten up the spacing over time everything just starts falling into place.

also for what its worth, i'd try to find a slow speed net to actually get on the air rather than just listening. there are some on 40m that run 5-10wpm and the guys are incredibly patient. actually exchanging callsigns and signal reports with real people did more for me in two months than a year of solo practice. something about the pressure of a real QSO makes your brain step up i think.

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you actually, maybe a little further along - sitting around 12wpm now but 20 feels like a mountain. one thing that helped me a lot was just listening to W1AW code practice sessions, they run at different speeds and the ARRL publishes what they're sending beforehand so you can check your copy. something about knowing you can verify afterward takes some of the anxiety out of it i think. also i started just leaving a slow CW net playing in the background while i was doing other stuff around the shack, not even actively trying to copy, just kind of ambient. no idea if thats scientifically valid but my brain did seem to start picking out words more automaticaly after a while