Many of us in the old days learned Morse Code in all sorts of ways that are considered "wrong" today: we counted dits; we visualized long and short sounds in characters, etc. Eventually, and rather quickly because we weren't told we were doing things "wrong" our speed increased and we went, automatically, from counting dits or dahs to hearing the overall sounds of characters.
But consider our objectives back then: Licenses were based on
three different code speeds:
1) 5 WPM for Novice
2) 13 WPM for General
3) 20 WPM for Extra
A lot of people learned code "the wrong way" because they did not, at least for a long while, have it as an actual
objective to go all the way to 20.
More power to you if you "naturally" moved between these levels. I did not and many, many, many did not. The levels were chosen to make that, in fact,
unnatural.
It used to be (don't think there's much of it now) a lot of people in the Novice HF CW bands, that were loping along at 5 to 12 WPM. Even Extras, in a kind mood, would tune into those band segments and work you at those speeds.
The different speeds were set for different ways the brain recognizes code. 5 to 12 is a speed where one
can recognize code by listening to individual dots and dashes. One can learn to recognize code that way at such speeds.
Many of us did so, because learning code, at any speed, is
hard and there was real value in learning 5 WPM. You needed it to do as much as talk 2m FM on a repeated back then. If you had
no objective but getting licensed, it could make a lot of sense to learn code at 5 WPM. That was enough to get you to Tech and if you didn't care about HF, that got you into a lot of things (this far back 2m FM was a much bigger deal than it is today). There were (probably still are) a lot of guys that turned 6m into a sort of specialty band and refused to use code because 5 WPM was just a way to get that microphone in one's hand.
However, if one does that (and a great many of us did), one then had to
unlearn counting dots and dashes because the brain is such that you can't reliably recognize Morse Code at 13 (certainly not 18) by picking out individual dots and dashes any more. That's darn near a human universal and, in fact, the three speeds were
chosen because that is so.
And, it
was a struggle for many of us (me included) precisely because we had to unlearn what got us to 5.
Getting from 13 to 20 was a slightly different struggle. At that point, one had already abandoned individual dots and dashes, but the requirement to at least
sometimes "copy back" -- remember a letter or two while decoding the current one -- was a different struggle. But, once again, there was a certain amount of
unlearning to be done. I know several people that just couldn't get past the 20 barrier. There were people suggesting, back in the day, that it was because they didn't go straight to 20 -- that is, they learned code for the FCC/VEC test and not really as a thing in itself. I don't know since I didn't take that road. But it might be true.
Well, in any case, I did all three but
only because my rationale changed over time and because, well, I wanted the license and 5 is fairly easy to learn. But, then I wanted HF and so I struggled, really struggled, for 13. Doing so, it got me to Advanced and most of the privileges. Then, a few years later, I decided I needed 20 for my DXing. There was a lot of DX to be had at 14.024 in those days.
I was at an Advanced level for quite a while and had almost all the frequency privileges. Had I not gotten into DXing in such a big way (or if I had put up a bigger station) I might have stayed at 13 to 18 indefinitely. A lot of hams did back then.
I also, frankly, dropped
out of Morse code for a while when I finally got to 13 and did a
lot of my beginner DXing with Phone only. Then, I wised up. Then, 20 became the goal and not
just to get a license.
This is why I asked what the goal was. We forget, now, that a lot of people
hated code that was force-fed to them as the price of getting a license. Such people learned code at 5 or 13
just to get the license they wanted and did little code after that in many, many cases. People don't want to admit that was so these days, but it was so.
There used to be Slow Speed Traffic Handling nets to accommodate the many who couldn't or wouldn't do the work to go to 20. They could still contribute, just at a slower speed.
A lot of hams
did stop at 13, at least until they took up DXing in a serious way and figured out that 20 to 25 WPM was a kind of secret society to success for modest stations.
But, when we dropped the code tests, we
also largely dropped the rationale for some of these old, slower speeds.
In 2023, I would advise precisely
nobody to learn the code at 5 WPM and I don't think many do. There is no longer a purpose for it.
The salient question is whether to try to go straight to 20. It's hard, harder than 13, but if you do it, then you won't have to break whatever habits form in the human brain when you do 13 but don't do the work to learn 20.
There are, presumably, more mental tricks required to operate about 25. I never learned them. But I do know that at that level, you aren't writing
anything down. You are hearing and comprehending whole phrases, not just individual letters. It becomes an actual language.
So, whether it was to get a Novice or Tech back in the day or high speed CW ragchewing today, the speed one aims for has to do with what the objectives are.
As far as I can make out, if you only care about DXing or contesting, 18 to 25 is a good objective. If you want real conversation, you might want more than that. Both for the sheer speed of it and also for the stamina (for lack of a better term) to go beyond the name, rank, serial number level exchanges.
But either one of those really sets the minimum bar at 20. There may be some hidden activities, unknown to me, where 13 to 18 WPM still reigns supreme. I just don't know what they are. I would be very surprised to find places where 5 to 12 WPM is still a highly populated place. Maybe a few still hang out in the old Novice segments -- I haven't listened in, so it could still be a thing. But, I doubt it.