I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here Are the Facts
scotthyoung.com
scotthyoung.com
However, many polyglots write in most articles about reading in a new language about one of two approaches:
1) Reading and understanding everything (to the point of dictionary lookups ad nauseam) 2) Skimming the text as fast as possible to build your pattern /phrase recognition abilities.
I wonder what applying speed reading techniques to reading a new language would do. Would it help you "skim" faster? Skimming the text of the new language as fast as possible is still pretty slow. Does anyone have experience with reading quickly/reading a lot to build their new language ability?
Both of the methods have their strengths. 1. Reading and understanding with dictionary: This takes a really, really long time just to read children's books and news articles. You wind up doing a lot of writing because of memory constraints, and a lot of rereading paragraphs to get the context. However, this is great for increasing vocabulary. Until you are to a certain point, however, it is probably better to learn main vocabulary words first, and then words that you will be using (interests, work, etc), and then work on the nuances.
2. Skimming: I'd not advise doing it as fast as possible, but this is good for figuring out key words you might not know and gives a clue on context. The second read, without a dictionary, you can pay more attention to details and figure some things out as you go along. I do this often and it helps me have a better grasp on the context - which is really more important.
Movies with subtitles are much better for this. An hour or two per day for a couple of months and you get like 10x further compared to reading.
They don't usually dub shows here - so many adult shows are in English. I think a good part of the movies produced are in English, and they stick Norwegian subtitles on the screen, which most folks ignore. I've found that they aren't exactly word for word - instead they are adjusted for style and culture at times. I'd have had some thing completely wrong on my own.
Children's shows on the state TV channels (think BBC for Norway) were the best find. Clear language without heavy dialects (some norwegians cannot understand each other's dialects well) plus subtitles if I wanted, transcripts on the website, and simple language. And always dubbed - kids don't start learning English until around 6 years old. Video games are usually in English. I spent many hours watching Spiderman cartoons.
However, I've met plenty of people that learned English solely through television shows and movies.
You don't see it as much today as previously, but sometimes you could hear on cinemas that people was laughing in response to the subtitles rather than the spoken words, even for English language movies. It can still happen with movies with an older audience, though today most younger people will have watched enough movies and series downloaded from the net (without subtitles obviously) that they are more used listen to the words, and in general more exposed to English.
Not really a problem anymore with e-readers though: just click the word and there's the definition or the translation.
It does work much better online, however, with the translate extension on chrome - though sometimes this stuff is hit and miss, at least with Norwegian - especially with phrases where a preposition changes the meaning.
If your comprehension of the text is 50℅, you probably won't get enough from the same-language dictionary definition.
IIRC there are ways to hack around this, and install a bilingual dictionary to replace one of the Kindle's regular dictionaries.
The key to language acquisition (acquisition giving you the ability to use the language without undue thought or planning) is repeated exposure in a comprehensible way. So you would think that skimming would be ideal because you can be exposed to the patterns more quickly.
The problem is that research has shown that you require 95% comprehension before you can infer the meaning of unknown language based on context. So unless you are already very familiar with the vast majority constructs and vocabulary, you will not be able to infer anything new and you will not learn anything.
My opinion is that native readers can skim because they already are very familiar with the structures and can guess what's going to be said. This allows them to skip over most of the sentence and still pick out the meaning. The less familiar you are with the structures, the less success you will have (and research shows that the drop off is very dramatic).
On the plus side, the average novel has thousands of unique vocabulary and virtually all commonly used grammar. If you work through a single book, you will cover a huge chunk of the language. And since authors often stick to their favoured vocabulary and sentence structures, once you get half way through, you can usually read without a dictionary. Certainly if you read a second or third book in the series, it can go very quickly.
As an interesting(?) side note, I met my wife when both her English and my Japanese were quite poor. This meant that we had to listen very intently to each other. When the other person got it wrong, we knew it was a mistake and not a matter of not listening. I find that most people (me too) do not listen well in their native language and "skim" conversations -- listening to a small fraction and making the rest up. This is just not possible for beginner-intermediate language learners and ironically it formed the basis for excellent communication between my wife and I. Now that our other language skills have improved, we do not communicate nearly as well!
like a toddler?
The person that posted was correct (as far as I understand it). Repeated exposure to comprehensible language (input) leads to acquisition (this is what Stephen Krashen argues, and which is the currently most popular theory as far as I know). The mechanism is the same for adults as well as toddlers (this is what Noam Chomsky argued, and which is generally accepted).
Memorising grammar is not necessary for language acquisition in children, nor in adults. The question is whether it can speed things up. Even if you agree with Krashen, it probably can because it provides a framework for reasoning about the meaning of something. It becomes an extra tool for creating comprehensible input rather than relying on context alone.
Many people believe that using grammar rules to generate output speeds the acquisition process. My understanding of the literature (now about 5 years out of date, unfortunately) indicates that this is not at all popular. In fact, it is said to be counter productive. My experience teaching English as a foreign language also supports the notion that constructing output from grammar rules should be avoided.
You can imagine that TPR can not teach all kinds of grammar or concepts (for example, how would you explain government). There are other techniques for creating a context that allows comprehension of these kinds of things. One of the keys is to teach yes/no questions early so that you can probe your student's understanding without them having to speak. It takes time for students to acquire the language well enough to produce.
This is quite an involved topic and many of the teaching techniques are quite new. I have used TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling -- not connected with TPR) in the classroom quite effectively.
If you are interested in modern theories of language acquisition, I recommend reading "Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition" which is available for free download from Krashen's web site: http://www.sdkrashen.com/
Although it may have escaped your notice, I've tried to point out that this is not the only competing theory in language acquisition at the moment, but it is the one which has the most acceptance now (or at least 5 years ago when I was actively reading up on the subject). Learning language primarily from grammar rules has been discredited as an effective technique for at least 50 years now. Unfortunately educators have not kept up with current research. Having said that, my experience is that some knowledge of grammar can be useful as a supplement.
I would be interested to try something like the spritz method with audio that stayed synchronized.
It seems like when I was younger it was easier for me to get completely immersed in a book to the point where I wasn't really seeing the individual words anymore. I would enter a flow state where I would just see the contents of the book unfolding in my mind's eye. Listening to the audio while I read puts me back into that state very quickly and keeps me focused. I have only been doing this for a couple of weeks so it is still early days. It seems like I keep more of it in my mind and notice larger patterns and themes that unfold over many pages.
You're welcome :)
You used to have to pay full price for both which made it too expensive for me but they seem to have started offering cheaper upgrades recently.
There's some research that shows learning is improved when the information is presented in multimedia form.
So much cheaper, in fact, that the ebook+audio bundle often costs less than their monthly Audible subscription which lets you buy one audiobook per month for $15.
Sometimes you need to slow right down, but a lot of the time you can skim and still get full comprehension.
This is very content dependent, so it's clearly inaccurate to assume that reading is reading, and one speed fits all.
Also, proper speed reading focuses on science and training.
About subvocalization, I couldn't care less if it disappears completely or not. The important thing is that you start training other parts of your brain to be associated with common words first as images. You certainly get a deeper understanding when you could understand words as images.
As someone who can program myself I can speed read extremely fast if I manipulate the text "on my own terms" with my own software. Something like spritz but reading more and more words at once, and using different colors for different things.
With training you can be extremely fast, in the same way with training you can do a backflip with a motorbike if you train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLwxGB1qFI
You have to evaluate if it is worth the effort for you to get the skills. If you need to read a lot I believe it is.
The biggest problem I have is the convenience problem of having to violate copyright restrictions like cracking epub to remove DRM or OCRing books in order to access the content for my programs.
It is a convenience thing, yes I can read much faster, but I need to spend a lot of time breaking the DRM or correcting the OCR. It only makes sense with few specific texts.
Did you consider the possibility that they rigged the test? You read a difficult text at your normal slow rate, and you score 90% comprehension. Then they give you an easy text to speed read, and surprise-surprise, you score 90% on the easy test.
Or they could give you a difficult text but ask easy questions about it. There are so many ways to cheat the methodology.
I'm wondering if a speed reading course is going to do objective tests on its paying customers.
Funny story: I once saw a Rubik's Cube competition in which players were competing to see who solved it the fastest. There were 3 rounds to competition, and in each round all the players got a freshly scrambled cube (each players' cube scrambled the same way of course). In the 1st round, the fastest player took about a minute; in the 2nd round, 45 seconds, and in the 3rd round, someone solved it in 20 seconds!
It was obvious to me that the competition organizers had chosen highly disordered cubes for the 1st round and less disordered cubes for the 3rd round. They rigged the test because they want more drama for the final round.
But if this is right, I made a good call by not spending the time trying to learn to "speed read" as I'm close to the max anyway. I don't know if I should feel happy or sad about that. It would be nice to be able to read faster, but... at least I know I'm not a complete laggard.
When the topic isn't technical documentation.
I seriously don't believe much use comes out of ingesting as many letters as possible. People don't work that way, especially when it comes to self-improvement. Your thought-patterns are able to change fast, but your emotional patterns are not. Real intellectual and emotional growth takes it's time.
I also believe, through experience in professional environments, that I'm at about the top of the bell curve in terms of reading speed in my native language. I don't meet many/any people to the right of me on a day to day basis. My position is not that surprising: while I didn't get to start coding at 5 like some people with early access to computers, I certainly got to start reading early: my parents effectively had a library of books, we had frequent and regular trips to the library as a child to pick up a stack of new books each week or two (it was considered a treat), and I was repeatedly being told to stop reading in polite company, turn the light off and go to sleep, etc etc etc.
This speed slows down significantly for technical articles, and I've often told people they should get used to having to read some 5 or 6 times, and shouldn't feel stupider/behind the pack if they have to do so. If they don't have to do so, it suggests they either already have experience with the material being presented, or its not that dense/new/hard/original. Most people in academia/corporate aren't reading/understanding the articles anyway, no matter what they say, which is of course our society's dirty little secret: image over doing...
Anyway...
My conclusion is that speed reading (significantly beyond this speed barring all but MAYBE in the rare case of cognitive/physical mutations) is effectively bunkum, because I've never seen it: and yet it just keeps popping up like a kind of zombie-myth that just won't die.
I've also found you quickly get into the comprehension/read-speed debate with "speed readers", to which my general response is actually very similar to programming algorithm efficiency: You can't speed up a computer, but you can change the amount of work it does. If your definition of speed reading is lowering your comprehension, to me, "lowering comprehension" is just another way of saying "not reading".
So i'll say that again as a rule of thumb: if your comprehension of a piece is dropping below the 100% you'd achieve normally, that's not called "speed reading", its called "not reading".
The main difficulty now is I am frustrated that my DVR, Roku, and DVD player do not support this.
The benefits of this are clear and obvious for people who do large amounts if reading out of necessity or pleasure.
So "Have more (enjoyable activity), faster!" That might not apply to sex.
And, as an added bonus, you get to read twice as much.
Who wouldn't want that? I'd certainly take a doubling of my current reading speed if I could. And after that, I'd accept another doubling. And another. There are so many great books, and so little time.
If you find yourself immersed in a lot of material that is so vapid, uninteresting, and inconsequential that you can simply skim all of it with no negative consequences, I'd suggest that perhaps you have some life choices to re-examine.
Whether it's dense full of ideas or just has wonderful prose -- I get so much more out of it when I really take my time.