so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 12-13wpm and it feels like i hit a wall. when i first started using the LCWO site i went from 0 to 5wpm pretty fast, then crawled to 10, and now its like my brain just refuses to go higher. i know the characters fine, i can copy them at slow speeds but the moment i bump it up i start falling behind and then i panic and lose the whole word.

im using the Koch method and doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes less if work is crazy. is that enough? i heard some people say you gotta do it every single day no matter what but honestly thats hard. also should i be doing head copy or writing everything down, im kinda doing both right now depending on how im feeling that day.

anyway if you made it past 20 im curious how long it took and what actually worked for you. feels like im gonna be at 12wpm forever at this rate

oh man this brings back memories, i was stuck at exactly the same spot for like 2 months and was ready to give up on CW entirely. what finally broke it for me was something an old timer at my club told me - stop writing stuff down. just listen. your hand trying to keep up is actually slowing your brain down because you're thinking about the pencil instead of the sound. took me maybe a week of just listening and copying in my head before stuff started clicking again.

also the daily thing is real, i know its annoying to hear but even 10 minutes every day beats 45 minutes three times a week, at least thats how it worked for me. the brain needs that regular reinforcement i guess. and honestly the biggest jump i got was when i stopped practicing with a code generator and just started listening to actual QSOs on 40m even when i couldnt copy half of it. something about real operators sending real words just trains your ear differently than perfect machine code.

yeah the 10-15wpm plateau is a thing, pretty much everyone hits it. took me close to a year to get comfortable at 20 but i wasnt super consistent about practicing so take that with a grain of salt. one thing that helped me a lot was bumping the character speed way up like to 20 or 25wpm even while keeping the word spacing slower (Farnsworth method i think its called) so your brain learns what the letters actually sound like at speed instead of counting dits and dahs. once you start hearing letters as sounds instead of patterns it gets a lot easier.