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I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

scotthyoung.com

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Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#61

Post by Mirioron »

furyofantares wrote: post #58

My speed reading method is just to skip every other paragraph. It's really surprising how effective this is for a lot of texts, and you can adjust how much you skip as you go, dependent on the text.

I think a better method is to read at least the first sentence of every paragraph and last sentence on short paragraphs. This way you have an idea on what the paragraph is about.

Another thing you can do is scan the paragraph you're skipping when reading the other paragraph for keywords.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#62

Post by PhasmaFelis »

pmoriarty wrote: post #10

I practice what could be called "speed listening" -- listening to audiobooks and podcasts (and watching videos) at 2x to 3x speed. It saves a lot of time, and I only wish I'd started sooner.

Suppose it depends on what you're listening to and why, but I mostly listen to podcasts for entertainment, and I don't want to rush entertainment. I have enough trouble finding good stuff as it is.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#63

Post by Dylan16807 »

hanoz wrote: post #47
Buttons840 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It requires more effort and more precision. So I'll say no. Having trouble with something and compensating by doing a more difficult task is only a good coping strategy when it's something you very rarely have to do.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#64

Post by Mirioron »

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.

>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.

This is actually how many people learn Japanese. They get an anki deck with kanji and their meanings and learn from that. The decks might have some pronunciations of the kanji, but typically not all of the pronunciations (or people don't learn them). This leads to a situation where they can read text and understand most (all?) of it, but would have difficulty reading it out loud.

Japanese kanji (and Chinese hanzi) are logographic. Each symbol denotes a word or a phrase and depending on the context it can have a different pronunciation, however the meanings generally stay rather similar.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#65

Post by lostlogin »

StavrosK wrote: post #39
Reedx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read a book that could literally be summed up in a sentence (it was called "the asshole rule" or something similar, and the gist was "don't hire assholes"). There was nothing at all in addition to that, except for a bunch of feel-good anecdotes and specious data that misrepresented correlation for causation. I hated it so much that I made a (now defunct) website where I would post summaries of these books so people…

Content bloat with needless crap seems to have happened to novels, movies and tv shows. It’s interesting to read penguin classics - maybe they don’t represent their respective eras, but they are usually (very subjectively) quite short.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#66

Post by Retric »

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…

A big part of this is what kind of measurement your doing. I can easily boost my typing speed with a few errors. However, I would much rather type at 99.98% accuracy at 35WPM when programming or doing data entry than 80WPM at even 99.9% accuracy.

However, if your spending most of the day emailing people extreme accuracy is effectively pointless.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#67

Post by Mirioron »

csa wrote: post #42
Terr_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

>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.

Isn't this a common occurrence when you just can't think of a word, but it's on the tip of your tongue? Another thing that's similar to this would be all the symbols we run into in real life. Things such as traffic signs, trademarks, settings buttons, hamburger menu etc.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#68

Post by godelski »

StavrosK wrote: post #39
Reedx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read a book that could literally be summed up in a sentence (it was called "the asshole rule" or something similar, and the gist was "don't hire assholes"). There was nothing at all in addition to that, except for a bunch of feel-good anecdotes and specious data that misrepresented correlation for causation. I hated it so much that I made a (now defunct) website where I would post summaries of these books so people…

Sounds like the book was doing something different though. Why should you believe that one sentence? The author has to sell you on the idea and demonstrate why it is a bad idea to hire assholes. A singular sentence isn't going to be enough to convince you, and it shouldn't be.

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#69

Post by godelski »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
Terr_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? I didn't know how to pronounce many of the words when learning English, yet I knew what they meant. I did make up my own pronunciation, if that's what you mean.

As a native English speaker who read a lot as a kid, there are many words I've found as I got older that I was pronouncing entirely incorrectly. So I think this is quite common (I know several others like this)

Re: I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

#70

Post by zhte415 »

enz wrote: post #45

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.

Wouldn't a mathematical proof not (only) written with mathematical symbols be much harder to read?
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