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I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

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Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#41

Post by Buttons840 »

Reedx wrote: post #11

Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.

I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name, etc.

Being able to type 30~40 WPM is good enough though, no need to be super speedy.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#42

Post by csa »

Terr_ wrote: post #27
GolDDranks wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, as a non-native English speaker who mainly interface English through written language and rarely via spoken language, find this fascinating. I am able to read articles and blog posts in English rapidly and with full comprehension, but I'm totally NOT able to speak out loud most of the words. I find that it's mostly through visual medium the words "come" to me.

I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading. Maybe an experiment could involve a fictional ideogram language, and compare peoples subvocalizing (or lack thereof) versus their native one.

This is very possible.

Japanese was my first foreign language. I could read a lot of Chinese while having no idea how to pronounce it. Furthermore, once I learned some fairly basic grammar in Chinese, I could read some texts with a fairly high level of accuracy.

All that said, I’m pretty sure I sub-vocalized in Japanese.

I will also say that there are words in both languages where I have forgotten the pronunciation of certain characters, but I remember what the characters mean.

Thinking more about this some more, I’m pretty sure that there is a conceptual and/or visual “sub vocalization” that I have experienced where I clearly knew what something meant, but the words to say it in any language didn’t readily come to my mind. Specifically, there are concepts in Japanese (esp classical four characters combos) that I almost certainly didn’t know the pronunciation of, but I knew exactly what they meant, and the idea didn’t really directly translate into English (e.g., 不惜身命, which was use by Takahanada/Takanofuji when he became yokozuna).

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#43

Post by ALittleLight »

Reedx wrote: post #31
quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to speed read is if the writer reduces the number of words required to communicate and educate. Of course this takes extra effort, and is also goes against human perception of value. E.g. if you reduced Tim Ferris's book to a single sheet of A4 you could get the point across, but who's going to pay $20 or so for a sheet of A4? Well some execs might pay $2000 - but you won't sell millions of copies like t…

That's something I've been wondering about. How many non-fiction books could be reduced by 90% and still communicate 90% of the ideas? I feel like we're losing a lot of time and potential due to filler pages.

A lot of non-fiction is about trying to make a case or prove some thesis. As such, a book may try to show lots of evidence, deal with many potential counter arguments, or demonstrate that different lines of analysis lead to the same conclusion. If you become convinced of the thesis early on a lot of the book can seem redundant.

When I find myself in such a position I usually just stop reading but include the ideas I got out of it in my notes. Later, if I find myself needing the details I skipped, it's easy to go back.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#44

Post by emodendroket »

rmason wrote: post #4

I took a speed reading course one summer when I was in college. My mother thought that it would give me an edge. First they test you and my reading speed was already on the high end of normal. In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no pro…

I think the skill many of us need to cultivate is the opposite one -- slowing down and carefully reading a challenging text. It took me a while to get out of "the final is tomorrow so I've got to blow through the rest of this book today" mode.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#45

Post by enz »

I can understand a lot of Japanese words written in kanjis without knowing how to pronounce them. So I am basically forced to read without any subvocalization and it’s pretty tough to understand any text longer than 5 lines.

It feels like trying to understand a mathematical proof that has been written only with mathematical symbols.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#46

Post by Syzygies »

So I'm scrolling through this article, reading more carefully at first to model his thought processes, then picking up a few words per paragraph, formulating a hypothesis as to what he's saying in that paragraph, making a spot check to confirm my hypothesis, and moving on. I was oblivious to the irony here, as I was focused on reading. When I realized I was a counterexample to his thesis, I cracked up and had to stop.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#47

Post by hanoz »

Buttons840 wrote: post #41
Reedx wrote: post #11

Reading speed strikes me similarly to typing speed when it comes to programming. It's fun to read/type fast, but it's not really the bottleneck.

I've worked with some programmers who were so slow at typing I would find myself reluctant to help them with their "hands on" work, like directing them to try something in the REPL for example, or even just asking them to run a shell command. It was a struggle for me not to excuse myself as soon as possible once they started typing. They seemingly couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hu…

> couldn't get a single word out without a typo, and would frequently hunt down other places in the code so they could copy paste that 6 character variable name

The latter seems a good strategy for coping with the former, does it not?

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#48

Post by jerf »

Terretta wrote: post #15

On “subvocalization” ... > It’s simply not possible to comprehend what you’re reading and avoid using that inner voice. So reading faster means being able to use this inner voice faster, not eliminating it. To further that, expert speed readers who were studied also subvocalized, they just did it faster. I’ve seen this argued elsewhere, and am not convinced they’ve found readers who do not subvocalize to study. Most…

I find it hard to believe I'm subvocalizing when I read at my normal pace on "average" text (i.e., not academically-dense), on the grounds that I can't read aloud at anything even remotely resembling the speed with which I normally read, no matter how hard I may try.

I can believe that various stray neural impulses may still end up getting sent, or that I subvocalize key words and my conscious self doesn't notice. But in the sense that I think people expect, where we could just take the subvocalizations and somehow lift them up to vocalizations with some obvious transform and understand the results? No way.

There's a world of difference between "everyone whether they realize it or not are fully reading aloud every word they read, just too quietly to hear" and "various small stray impulses may make their way down to the vocal cords". Perhaps there is lack of clarity about what "subvocalization" means?

I also find it hard to believe on the grounds that while by no means can I sustain this for long periods of time, I can be speaking to someone while reading something else. Generally I have my sentence "queued up", so to speak, so it isn't consuming the executive function, while I'm using the executive function to read. Even thought this may be for small single-digit number of seconds, that's still plenty to find it hard to believe that I am simultaneously "subvocalizing" what I'm reading while I'm also vocalizing a completely different set of words, which may not even be on the same train of thought.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#49

Post by sitkack »

dredmorbius wrote: post #36
sitkack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a huge Mortimer Adler fan, do you have any other recommendations in the same vein? You might also like the books by https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/

Adler seems to stand pretty well by himself, and is the best I've found. There's plenty of subtandard works, and avoiding wasting time with those is its own reward. Philosophy generally offers high mileage, and Peter Adamson's "History of Philosophy" podcast delivers much of this, as well as a suprising amount of historiography addressing how documents came to be made, lost, rediscovered, and reconstructed. Edmund Bu…

Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I have every book by Adler and nearly everything published by Piaget and Dewey.
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