so ive been at this for about 8 months now and im stuck. i started learning CW back in the spring and got to about 5wpm pretty quickly using the Koch method on lcwo.net but ever since then its been like hitting a wall. im at maybe 8wpm now if im being generous and i just cannot seem to break through.

my biggest problem i think is that im still counting dits and dahs in my head even though i know thats not how you're supposed to do it. like i KNOW i should be hearing the whole character as a sound but my brain just keeps defaulting back to counting. does that ever go away on its own or do you have to actively fight it?

i listen to W1AW code practice sessions sometimes but honestly at anything above 10wpm i just feel lost and it gets discouraging. a friend suggested just jumping to 20wpm and accepting that i'll miss stuff at first, something about farnsworth spacing? not sure i fully understand how that works. anyway curious what approach actually got people over the hump because there's a million opinions out there and i dont know what to trust

the Farnsworth thing your friend mentioned is actually really good advice and i wish someone had told me earlier. basically you set the character speed high - like 20wpm - but put extra space between letters so you have more time to think. the idea is your brain learns the sound of each character at full speed from the start, so you never build in that counting habit at the fundamental level. lcwo lets you do this, just set character speed to 20 and effective speed to maybe 8 or 10 and work your way up from there.

the counting dits and dahs thing does go away but you kind of have to starve it out. if the characters come too fast to count, your brain gives up and starts recognizing the shape of the sound instead. took me probably 3 months of daily practice to really feel that click where letters just started coming as sounds. not gonna lie it was frustrating before that happened but it does happen.

also just - head copy as much as you can. dont write stuff down all the time. try to just listen and let it wash over you even if you miss a lot. that helped me more than anything else honestly.

im sort of in the same boat actually, around 10wpm and feeling stuck, so watching this thread. one thing that helped me a tiny bit was just listening to random QSOs on 40m even when i cant copy most of it. something about hearing real code instead of practice recordings feels different to my brain. callsigns and signal reports start jumping out after a while even when the rest is mush lol