I sounded out the letters and numbers in my head that I seen on road signs. I was too young to have a driver’s license, but this helped limit my boredom while I gazed out the window of my dad’s 1953 Chevy Bel Air. Code practice was also supplemented with an old Zenith floor radio that included SW bands. Sometimes it took hours to finally find a station that was not only slow enough to copy, but also one that was adjacent to a foreign broadcast station. CW is difficult to copy without a BFO providing a beat tone. Finding a nearby foreign broadcast station merely took the place of the BFO circuit that was absent in that old radio. Looking back at my experience, I believe this also helped me prepare for copying CW under adverse ORM conditions, but I wouldn’t recommend such a crude method for today's beginner. With all the great CW compatible receivers nowadays, I highly suggest using one for real life practice. As for hitting a wall, CW is not a gradual learning process like some skills. It comes in unexpected spurts. If you practice a little every day, there will be times when you wake up noticing yourself copying code much faster than the previous day. I don’t know why that happens, but I suspect a fresh start after a good night’s sleep has something to do with it.