4 ms·
He's actually got two posts about it, that I've found to be insightful and useful to take back to my own reading: http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/
by wcarss 11y ago
He's actually got two posts about it, that I've found to be insightful and useful to take back to my own reading:
http://blog.fogus.me/2012/02/22/reading/
http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/
I've always been a horribly slow reader, despite enjoying reading and reading at a high level. A lot of that slowness is actually about the time I devote to reading (toilet time and bed time, essentially), the level of interest I have in the material (usually "enough to continue"), and a symptom of my out-of-practice reading skill, which leads to me primarily subvocalizing instead of reading, and frequently backtracking. Spending 10-15 minutes every other day reading at 200 words per minute does not make for a quick journey through a book.
After thinking of it in those terms, I've started to apply the idea that the more I read, the faster I will read (up to a point), to actively avoid subvocalization, and to devote real blocks of time to reading instead of fitting it in at the edges. I find that I end up reading closer to 400 wpm during focused time, and when I want to, I'm able to average 1-2 hours/day of a week. Spending that much time at 400ish words per minute makes books fly past. Keeping comprehension up and realizing value is where taking some notes comes into it.
Beyond that, as he says, you have to know what you're reading a book for. For example, it's probably not worth reading the introduction and basic content chapters of technical books you're already up-to-speed on, and you can skip right to the important parts and just read them deeply.
- dilap 11y agoreading w/o subvocalization as a goal seems really weird to me! i feel like for stuff like novels the vocalization & imagined richness of the world is kind of part of the point, and for technical material, grasping the ideas is by far going to be the limiting factor. (e.g., easy to spend an hour on 1 page of a math text.)
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI didn't even realize people subvocalized when reading until recently, when a friend mentioned it off-hand. It's really hard to analyze - if I think about it, I start doing it - but I'm pretty sure I don't subvocalize when I read at all.
- soperj 11y agoI had the exact same thing happen to me. I definitely don't subvocalize, and didn't realize it was a thing until I read about it on here. The next week was excruciating trying to read anything because I kept doing it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Nadya 11y agoI don't understand what subvocalization even is, based on the Wikipedia article. It sounds like "the voice in your head reads things as you do". So I'll go with that. I can't read without subvocalization... I tried keeping my mind preoccupied with gibberish words and even thinking in a foreign language but a second voice chimes in with the words as I'm reading them in the background. This is also quickly mentally exhausting... I don't consider myself a slow reader - as I speedread at 700~800wpm. The subvocalization merely happens by slurring words together as if playing a movie on x3 Fast Forward w/ sound. I'm not capable of seeing how it hurts the rate of reading. I could see voicing or actually reading aloud to slow down reading, but not this.
- MichaelGG 11y agoI can speedread around that rate too. Subvocalization is really hard for me to do; I tend to just "read faster". A few times I believe I've managed it and it did feel like I was able to go much faster. Maybe it's like meditating, where you gotta try not to think?
- dilap 11y agoi also can't read w/o the little voice in my head, but it is an interesting idea. is there a website to test reading speed + comprehension? i'm thinking something w/ like an auto-generated story of fixed elements ("a pig and a horse visit the blue house on the hill", "a donkey and an ostrich cross the bridge over a river"), or maybe just a sampling of a large corpus of real text of similar level. you get timed on how long it takes you to read it + given a basic test to see if you actually absorbed it. would be interesting to get some numbers, and also see if these (mythical?) non-subvocalizers really are faster. i think i could see it maybe working, but i also feel like the words would be taking a whole new path through my brain. almost like a new language.
- soperj 11y agoThe way I'd describe non-subvocalization is how I would describe the way my brain understands french(which i speak fluently) and german(which I don't). With French I don't need to translate anything into english to understand its meaning, where as in German I have to translate most stuff to english before having any understanding of the sentence. I don't have to hear a voice inside my head telling me the words, I just sort of understand what the text is telling me.
- fogus 11y ago> easy to spend an hour on 1 page of a math text. Absolutely true! I don't read much math, but I have and my reading rate was much slower. There have been a few books over the past year that took me months to get through whereas most others took a matter of days. I read a few books in parallel though.