I wonder if reading a book or listening to audio book without comprehending it at the time of reading/listening is still valuable?<p>Case 1. Imagine you are reading (your eyes going through text) and brain got distracted while trying to comprehend and compare what you are reading with your experience from the past. You realize it after 1 page is done. Do you think your brain still can store chunks of data?<p>Case 2. You are reading super insightful book, which has 10 primary insights per page, but you only understand 1 insight.
Do you think your brain still saved other insights and eventually will reveal it to you?<p>Case 3. You are listening audiobook and your brain didn't keep up with the content (language understanding or trying to comprehend past sentences made you think about it too much, and anything else) Because going back and forth can slow down the listening, do you think continuing listening is still valuable and gives enough insights?<p>Why am I asking? I have mild ADHD and reading books is difficult to me, add into this language understanding (English is not my native language) and I am spending 10-15 minutes per page, trying to understand everything.<p>At the same time, OReilly subscription makes me really sad, by telling book with ~200 pages takes 5h to finish.
You can't learn unless you understand. So spending the time to understand what you are reading is well worth the time.<p>I'm someone that had great difficulty getting through books at one time. I would read a sentence, my mind would wonder and then I could not understand what I had just read so I had to read it again. It happened over and over again. It was so frustrating.<p>I got passed it by constantly reading. Figure out what you like to read and read that as much as possible. The more you do it the easier it gets. I won't be easy. It took me years to be able to read a book without constantly having to reread sentences.<p>Also, reading might not be the best way for you to learn. Try other methods and see if you can find an easier way to learn.
1. That is why reading is the king. You just reread. If you do not reread, you do not have a story.<p>2. Definitely not. I know one of such book, I use to reread it once per every few months. Year after year I keep finding new insights.<p>3. Going back or forth is stupidly realised on any music player except vinyl and maybe casette, that's why you might consider to keep listening. Normally after missing a few words, the text became glibberish, but typical news or Youtube content may be keep listening without losing the context even at higher speed.<p>200 pages per 5h is not slow if you are reading OReilly even on your mother language.
You have to be able to understand it on at least one level.<p>If there is no understanding at all, as in reading a book written in a foreign language, the 'words' are just space-delimited jumbles of letters.<p>Even then, you can at least try to sound them out, I suppose. But a book written in Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai, or Chinese for (say) an American is just a bunch of meaningless squiggles.
No expert, but I do think that reading without comprehending helps--I find that it primes my brain to understand the content better when I go over it a second or third time.<p>I also struggle with reading speed, and I can easily to get lost when reading dense material, but what also helps me stay focused is actively annotating my thoughts on the page while I'm reading.
200pp in 5h is a reasonable time to read a book as if it were a novel—when I was younger a did more linear reading, my usual expectation was about 1 page per minute, which is 300pp in 5h—but that's usually not how I would expect one to consume a technical boom. to maximize value.