111–120 of 170 posts
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.
So, if you are a native speaker or you are fluent in the language, listening at a higher pace shouldn't be an issue.
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…
Do people using languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean read faster? In Chinese and Japanese a single character often means a word. In Korean, a single character is 3 letters. It's very simple: words use much less space in languages like that, so you need to move your eyes much less. Would a Chinese or Korean person read the same work of literature faster than an European - assuming they know all the words? If "vi…
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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…
I think it's good practice to copy variable names in order to avoid typos, at least in plain text editors.
I'm what I've come to call a 'slow thinker'. My perception speed is normal, but the gray matter ticks over at a very slow rate of knots and my comprehension of what I'm seeing/hearing/feeling unpacks over the course of several seconds. I've noticed I often have an initial reaction to things, then a 'slow reaction' that is sometimes quite different and factors in more things I know. It's like it takes some time to 'di…
I think reading fast is a really helpful skill though. It requires inhibition (knowing what words to skip) and selection (what words capture the attention) and some specialized knowledge of things like the typical structure of scientific papers.
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.
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…
Testing the notion that subvocalization slows you down should be reasonably easy. Just test people deaf since birth. Do they read faster? Visit some deaf communities. It's not immediately obvious, but many deaf people don't know how to read at all. Sign language (hand gestures) is a completely different language, different from English, Russian, Italian etc. To complicate stuff, there's not a single global sign langu…
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…
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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.
Beyond slowing down, a real challenge for many of us in this age of distraction is to keep one's attention focused on a single text for extended periods of time. I know I struggle with this myself despite being a life-long reader from the pre-Internet days who used to have no trouble staying focused through a full book.