
I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here Are the Facts - selmat
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-redo/
======
wallflower
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.

However, many polyglots write in most articles about reading in a new language
about one of two approaches:

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.

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?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I am just coming off of 2 years intensive Norwegian classes, and passed the
required tests at an intermediate level, reading and listening were at a high
intermediate level.

Both of the methods have their strengths. 1\. Reading and understanding with
dictionary: This takes a really, really long time just to read children's
books and news articles. You wind up doing a lot of writing because of memory
constraints, and a lot of rereading paragraphs to get the context. However,
this is great for increasing vocabulary. Until you are to a certain point,
however, it is probably better to learn main vocabulary words first, and then
words that you will be using (interests, work, etc), and then work on the
nuances.

2\. Skimming: I'd not advise doing it as fast as possible, but this is good
for figuring out key words you might not know and gives a clue on context. The
second read, without a dictionary, you can pay more attention to details and
figure some things out as you go along. I do this often and it helps me have a
better grasp on the context - which is really more important.

~~~
zzzcpan
> This takes a really, really long time just to read children's books and news
> articles.

Movies with subtitles are much better for this. An hour or two per day for a
couple of months and you get like 10x further compared to reading.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
If you can find them, but not everyone can.

They don't usually dub shows here - so many adult shows are in English. I
think a good part of the movies produced are in English, and they stick
Norwegian subtitles on the screen, which most folks ignore. I've found that
they aren't exactly word for word - instead they are adjusted for style and
culture at times. I'd have had some thing completely wrong on my own.

Children's shows on the state TV channels (think BBC for Norway) were the best
find. Clear language without heavy dialects (some norwegians cannot understand
each other's dialects well) plus subtitles if I wanted, transcripts on the
website, and simple language. And always dubbed - kids don't start learning
English until around 6 years old. Video games are usually in English. I spent
many hours watching Spiderman cartoons.

However, I've met plenty of people that learned English solely through
television shows and movies.

~~~
alephnil
Yes, only children programs are dubbed here, although I disagree that people
ignore them. We even subtitle programs movies in languages that more than 95%
of the people don't speak, and assume that people can read the subtitles.

You don't see it as much today as previously, but sometimes you could hear on
cinemas that people was laughing in response to the subtitles rather than the
spoken words, even for English language movies. It can still happen with
movies with an older audience, though today most younger people will have
watched enough movies and series downloaded from the net (without subtitles
obviously) that they are more used listen to the words, and in general more
exposed to English.

------
johnwatson11218
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.

I would be interested to try something like the spritz method with audio that
stayed synchronized.

~~~
ajsalminen
Kindle supports this for many titles. If you have both the book and the
audiobook you can read and listen and the app will highlight the words and
automatically progress the book.

You used to have to pay full price for both which made it too expensive for me
but they seem to have started offering cheaper upgrades recently.

There's some research that shows learning is improved when the information is
presented in multimedia form.

~~~
makeset
> they seem to have started offering cheaper upgrades recently.

So much cheaper, in fact, that the ebook+audio bundle often costs less than
their monthly Audible subscription which lets you buy one audiobook per month
for $15.

------
ddebernardy
It really depends on _what_ 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 _full_ comprehension - far
from it. But you'll get _a lot_ 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).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That's exactly my experience - especially the part about massive redundancy.

Sometimes you need to slow right down, but a lot of the time you can skim and
still get full comprehension.

This is very content dependent, so it's clearly inaccurate to assume that
reading is reading, and one speed fits all.

------
pipio21
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.

Also, proper speed reading focuses on science and training.

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.

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.

With training you can be extremely fast, in the same way with training you can
do a backflip with a motorbike if you train:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI)

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.

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.

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.

~~~
alister
> answer detailed questions in order to evaluate the percentage of your
> comprehension

Did you consider the possibility that they rigged the test? You read a
difficult text at your normal slow rate, and you score 90% comprehension. Then
they give you an easy text to speed read, and surprise-surprise, you score 90%
on the easy test.

Or they could give you a difficult text but ask easy questions about it. There
are so many ways to cheat the methodology.

I'm wondering if a speed reading course is going to do objective tests on its
paying customers.

Funny story: I once saw a Rubik's Cube competition in which players were
competing to see who solved it the fastest. There were 3 rounds to
competition, and in each round all the players got a freshly scrambled cube
(each players' cube scrambled the same way of course). In the 1st round, the
fastest player took about a minute; in the 2nd round, 45 seconds, and in the
3rd round, someone solved it in 20 seconds!

It was obvious to me that the competition organizers had chosen highly
disordered cubes for the 1st round and less disordered cubes for the 3rd
round. They rigged the test because they want more drama for the final round.

------
mindcrime
Interesting. I have always been intrigued by the _idea_ 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.

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.

------
groby_b
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.

------
cel1ne
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.

When the topic isn't technical documentation.

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.

------
ACow_Adonis
I believe I can read nicely formatted easy fiction at about 500 - 600 wpm.

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.

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...

Anyway...

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.

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".

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".

------
WalterBright
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.

The main difficulty now is I am frustrated that my DVR, Roku, and DVD player
do not support this.

------
imron
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.

The benefits of this are clear and obvious for people who do large amounts if
reading out of necessity or pleasure.

~~~
michaelmrose
Would you take more pleasure in reading faster? Apply that to any other
enjoyable activity. Have sex faster!

~~~
RogerL
Why not? I'm a very fast reader, and take great pleasure in reading. If you
(generic 'you', not michaelmrose you) read half as fast as I do, then take it
for granted that you could double your speed and take pleasure in it.

And, as an added bonus, you get to read twice as much.

Who wouldn't want that? I'd certainly take a doubling of my current reading
speed if I could. And after that, I'd accept another doubling. And another.
There are so many great books, and so little time.

------
InclinedPlane
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.

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.

------
Read-Speeder
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.

~~~
_mhr_
I've always found that when I read a (fictional) book, I naturally have a
mental movie playing in my head, and I cease to see words at all. I become
hyper-focused and immersed in the image. If people talk to me while I'm
reading (again, only fiction), I don't hear them unless they breach my focus
with a louder voice or a tap on the shoulder. It's interesting to read that
this can be taught.

------
edpichler
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.

------
KVFinn
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.

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.

------
nashashmi
Article title is missing publication year 2015.

------
foobar1962
That article needs a TL;DR summary.

