so ive been doing CW practice pretty consistently since i got my general last year and i hit 13wpm pretty quick, like within the first few months. but now its been maybe 4 or 5 months and i just cant seem to get past this wall. i do about 20-30 minutes a day with the koch method on the lcwo site and sometimes i fire up the radio and try to copy actual QSOs but it just turns to mush after a few seconds.

i started at 5wpm and honestly the jump up to around 10-12 felt pretty natural but something about that 13-15 range just feels like a brick wall. i read somewhere that this is common but nobody really explained WHY it happens or what to do differently. my character speed is set to 20 but my word speed is like 13 so maybe that mismatch is the issue? i dont know. anyone else gone through this and come out the other side?

oh man yes this is so real, i hit the exact same wall around 12-13 and i was ready to give up on CW entirely. what helped me more than anything was just forcing myself to stop writing everything down. like literally put the pencil away. your brain is spending so much energy trying to get the letter on paper before the next one comes that youre already behind before you start. took me a while to trust that i could just listen and let words form in my head instead of on paper. also the farnsworth spacing you mentioned — that 20/13 thing — is actually good practice but at some point you need to bump both numbers closer together, the gap can become a crutch.

keep at it. 20wpm felt impossible to me two years ago and now i actually prefer it to slower speeds because the rhythm is more natural somehow.

i went through this same thing last winter. what finally clicked for me was switching to listening to actual on-air CW every single day even if i couldnt copy most of it. just having it in your ears while you do other stuff around the shack seems to help your brain get used to the faster rhythm. also W1AW practice sessions are great for this, they do broadcasts at different speeds and you can kind of chase your target speed.

one other thing — are you recognizing letters as sounds yet or are you still counting dits and dahs in your head? because if its the latter thats probably your bottleneck right there, you kind of have to get past that to go any faster.