When you are learning a new language and in the beginner to intermediate chasm, reading in your native language is like speed reading compared to reading in your new language. It depends on the context of what you are reading, of course but it can be 10x - 100x slower.<p>However, many polyglots write in most articles about reading in a new language about one of two approaches:<p>1) Reading and understanding everything (to the point of dictionary lookups ad nauseam)
2) Skimming the text as fast as possible to build your pattern /phrase recognition abilities.<p>I wonder what applying speed reading techniques to reading a new language would do. Would it help you "skim" faster? Skimming the text of the new language as fast as possible is still pretty slow. Does anyone have experience with reading quickly/reading a lot to build their new language ability?
I have used the zapreader.com website to read longer articles before and found that I can understand everything when I keep it to about 500 wpm.
Recently I started downloading the audible.com audio books for novels that I have laying around. Then I listen to the book at 2X while reading the paperback. This really does seem like a large improvement. When I listen to just the audio book my mind tends to wander as I'm usually doing other things. Reading and hearing reinforce each other.<p>I would be interested to try something like the spritz method with audio that stayed synchronized.
It really depends on <i>what</i> you're reading. You can take a great many non-fiction e.g. social science books and stick to the introduction and conclusion, plus some skimming of what's in between, and still grok the general gist of what's in there. Not saying you get <i>full</i> comprehension - far from it. But you'll get <i>a lot</i> of it because it's massively redundant, especially if you're familiar with the underlying patterns and heuristics (which I'd argue are largely grounded in experimental social psychology).
I don't know what speed reading course this man took, but the one I took in Spain forced you to answer detailed questions in order to evaluate the percentage of your comprehension.<p>Also, proper speed reading focuses on science and training.<p>About subvocalization, I couldn't care less if it disappears completely or not. The important thing is that you start training other parts of your brain to be associated with common words first as images. You certainly get a deeper understanding when you could understand words as images.<p>As someone who can program myself I can speed read extremely fast if I manipulate the text "on my own terms" with my own software. Something like spritz but reading more and more words at once, and using different colors for different things.<p>With training you can be extremely fast, in the same way with training you can do a backflip with a motorbike if you train:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI</a><p>You have to evaluate if it is worth the effort for you to get the skills. If you need to read a lot I believe it is.<p>The biggest problem I have is the convenience problem of having to violate copyright restrictions like cracking epub to remove DRM or OCRing books in order to access the content for my programs.<p>It is a convenience thing, yes I can read much faster, but I need to spend a lot of time breaking the DRM or correcting the OCR. It only makes sense with few specific texts.
Interesting. I have always been intrigued by the <i>idea</i> of speed reading, but my "natural" reading speed always seemed just fast enough (around 500 wpm) that it never seemed worthwile to invest the time to get what I assumed would be a marginal increase in speed.<p>But if this is right, I made a good call by not spending the time trying to learn to "speed read" as I'm close to the max anyway. I don't know if I should feel happy or sad about that. It would be nice to be able to read faster, but... at least I know I'm not a complete laggard.
And in the second half of his article, Scott forgets to do research again: "How to read a book" by Mortimer Adler is the classic on improving comprehension.
Reading something fast is one thing, but thinking about it, concluding and understand is a whole other area, which can easily take days or weeks or at least a night to sleep over.<p>When the topic isn't technical documentation.<p>I seriously don't believe much use comes out of ingesting as many letters as possible. People don't work that way, especially when it comes to self-improvement. Your thought-patterns are able to change fast, but your emotional patterns are not. Real intellectual and emotional growth takes it's time.
I believe I can read nicely formatted easy fiction at about 500 - 600 wpm.<p>I also believe, through experience in professional environments, that I'm at about the top of the bell curve in terms of reading speed in my native language. I don't meet many/any people to the right of me on a day to day basis. My position is not that surprising: while I didn't get to start coding at 5 like some people with early access to computers, I certainly got to start reading early: my parents effectively had a library of books, we had frequent and regular trips to the library as a child to pick up a stack of new books each week or two (it was considered a treat), and I was repeatedly being told to stop reading in polite company, turn the light off and go to sleep, etc etc etc.<p>This speed slows down significantly for technical articles, and I've often told people they should get used to having to read some 5 or 6 times, and shouldn't feel stupider/behind the pack if they have to do so. If they don't have to do so, it suggests they either already have experience with the material being presented, or its not that dense/new/hard/original. Most people in academia/corporate aren't reading/understanding the articles anyway, no matter what they say, which is of course our society's dirty little secret: image over doing...<p>Anyway...<p>My conclusion is that speed reading (significantly beyond this speed barring all but MAYBE in the rare case of cognitive/physical mutations) is effectively bunkum, because I've never seen it: and yet it just keeps popping up like a kind of zombie-myth that just won't die.<p>I've also found you quickly get into the comprehension/read-speed debate with "speed readers", to which my general response is actually very similar to programming algorithm efficiency: You can't speed up a computer, but you can change the amount of work it does. If your definition of speed reading is lowering your comprehension, to me, "lowering comprehension" is just another way of saying "not reading".<p>So i'll say that again as a rule of thumb: if your comprehension of a piece is dropping below the 100% you'd achieve normally, that's not called "speed reading", its called "not reading".
I have recently taken up watching video at increased playback speeds from 1.1x to 2.0x. It greatly increases the variety of things I might be interested in watching. The Chrome browser with video speed controller plugin is exceptionally good at this.<p>The main difficulty now is I am frustrated that my DVR, Roku, and DVD player do not support this.
Although I agree that hyper speeds are not really possible/practical, this article still points out that if you have an average reading speed (200-400 wpm) you should still be able to double or significantly increase your reading speed through training.<p>The benefits of this are clear and obvious for people who do large amounts if reading out of necessity or pleasure.
No, frickin' duh. If you want to skim materials, go ahead and skim. But if you need to understand something, want to enjoy reading something, or need to remember the details from something, you have to read at a "normal" speed instead of skimming.<p>If you find yourself immersed in a lot of material that is so vapid, uninteresting, and inconsequential that you can simply skim all of it with no negative consequences, I'd suggest that perhaps you have some life choices to re-examine.
Of course you aren't going to read 1,000s of wpm! Unless you're some kind of savant. BUT... if you are a slow reader, reading below 200 wpm, then you can definitely learn to read faster. And even increasing your speed to 400 wpm would be absolutely life-changing. As the author of Reading with the Right Brain, and Speed Reading Practice, I have seen many people turn their reading from drudgery to enjoyment. From a word-by-word slog, to a mental movie playing in their head.
I don't do speed reading, I vocalize. As I am Brazilian, I only read English books to practice my second language.
I noticed that I improved my listening and speaking a lot, just reading. The improvement was bigger than usual when I read The Lord of the Rings, that has a rich vocabulary. I think this is because I sub-vocalize when I am reading. Speed reading also don't give me pleasure.
My default reading mode is to speed through text. It's useful for skimming for answers to specific questions but in other scenarios it's a bad impulse that I intentionally check.<p>Whether it's dense full of ideas or just has wonderful prose -- I get so much more out of it when I really take my time.