poss. related: colored gradients https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
111–120 of 216 posts
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#112Wow. I found "reading" their demo a deeply unpleasant experience. It seemed to induce tunnel vision, and put a huge amount of strain on my lenses. The dark background of the page surrounding the banner didn't help, and persisted in my vision for a good 5 minutes. My eyes still hurt.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#113Wow. I found "reading" their demo a deeply unpleasant experience. It seemed to induce tunnel vision, and put a huge amount of strain on my lenses. The dark background of the page surrounding the banner didn't help, and persisted in my vision for a good 5 minutes. My eyes still hurt.
I found the demo very impressive but I too have a large blue bar persisting in my vision right now. Very peculiar.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#114I played around with something like this a while ago (my files have 2004 timestamps, but those may have updated when I copied stuff to a new computer). I had a command-line based program that took text and displayed it a word at a time. If anyone would like to play around with it, here's my source. Compile: c++ speedread.cpp Usage: ./a.out [delay_in_ms] Should work on Mac and Linux, and maybe Windows if you uncomment…
my quick python version: https://gist.github.com/gosub/9206636
Mocked this up in 30 mins this evening.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#115> Can you see everything that I read?
> Well, we have to provide the content to you, don’t we? For more information, check out our Privacy Policy.
Or, the app could run locally after downloading a dictionary. Just sayin'.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#116This is very interesting (and as has been pointed out in other comments, not exactly a new idea). I think its proper application, though, is in a tool for practicing reading, not for actually reading tests. One major thing this approach looses is the inherent non-linearity of text. If I miss a fact and want to back up a bit, or want to pause for a moment and think about something, I can (when reading) without even th…
Huh, strange thing is it seems like I just can read that quickly anyway. Started on the banner at 250wpm, pretty comfortable, went straight to 500wpm on the banner and still fairly comfortable to read. So I thought I'd have a go at just reading some plain text as quickly as I comfortably could and it turns out that I can read more quickly than I do . I don't know why I don't read more quickly than I do, perhaps it do…
And that's how spritz gets its speed improvement -- by forcing you to go faster than you would choose to read.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#117A sincere and non-troll question - I'd be really interested in hearing from people who have a major use for speed reading. I'm finding it difficult to visualise the material such readers are encountering - are they reading for pleasure or work? Presumably, if the former, reading speed is unrelated to enjoyment (in fact, a slight negative correlation), while, if the latter, isn't the time spent actually reading a vanishingly tiny portion of digestion? It takes me (and I'd imagine most people?) around 5 minutes to read a menu, for instance, of which time my estimate would be that around 5-10 seconds were spent actually reading the words. But this technology is clearly of great interest to people - what am I missing?
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#118This is very interesting (and as has been pointed out in other comments, not exactly a new idea). I think its proper application, though, is in a tool for practicing reading, not for actually reading tests. One major thing this approach looses is the inherent non-linearity of text. If I miss a fact and want to back up a bit, or want to pause for a moment and think about something, I can (when reading) without even th…
I just did a random reading speed test and got 1640wpm with 90% comprehension, and I definitely do not read linearly -- it's hard to explain, but I often find that I scan far ahead and see the ends of sentences before their starting words, then wander around somewhat randomly in the middle of them. I'll notice typos and grammar errors several sentences or even a paragraph after where it occurs, probably meaning that I'm taking huge "gulps" of words and internally buffering it, then processing it very nonlinearly. I've never taken any courses on speed reading, but I guess I developed this habit from reading code (where a lot of the time is spent seeking). The Spritz experience was a little disorienting since I kept wanting to seek around in the text, and being linearly spoonfed it gave me the feeling of losing track of what I'd just "read".
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#119I had a summer job once in high school working in the office of a small business that published test preparation books and related products. They had devoted one of their rooms to a speed reading course; one day the teacher told me that as an employee I could take the course at no charge. I said that I could already read as fast as I could think, and he rolled his eyes and said, "You people who think." I believe that…
By 'think' do you mean 'comprehend the text you're reading' in this context?
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethnologue states that there are 7105 languages in the world[0]. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that you can have x second languages, where x is any number between 0 and 7104. [0] https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics
No, you can have only one second language, and then possibly third, fourth, and so on.
Not true in idiomatic English. Any language other than your 'first' can be called a 'second language'. As a common example of this usage, courses to learn English for non-native speakers are called "English as a Second Language (ESL)" - no matter how many other languages the students already know.