How fast do I talk? | Hacker News Reader

How fast do I talk?

hillelwayne.com

118 pointscolinprince48 comments

If anyone wants a "weird old tip" for better enunciation: finishing schools had an exercise where students would practice speaking with their mouth full of marbles or gravel. After talking out loud for a few minutes, one can spit them out and have perceptibly better enunciation.

You can do this more safely by biting down on a wine cork. Read a page or two out of a book out loud, remove, and then read another. It's quite remarkable. (I learned this trick from a theater class back in high school I think…)

https://www.activepresence.com/blog/public-speaking-articula...

2-3 fingers vertically in mouth also works in a pinch if you don't have anything else handy. It's really good for those about-to-walk-on-stage moments to induce enunciation.

I thought biting down a pencil was the state-of-the-art. What are the advantages of using a cork vs a pencil?

Size. It is more difficult to speak clearly with a larger object, so it forces you to focus a bit more.

this could be turned into a pickup line that'll likely never work

It certainly is old – Demosthenes was 4th century BC.

The indistinctness and lisping in his speech he used to correct and drive away by taking pebbles in his mouth and then reciting speeches. - Plutarch's Lives, Demosthenes

Not just that, he would shout over the ocean with pebbles in his mouth. I'm sort of wondering how he didn't damage his voice, though.

Good tip. My theater coach in high school taught me another trick -- no cork needed.

For (almost) every consonant of the alphabet, stress lips and recite that letter, e.g. for "m", "muh-muh-muh, muh-muh-muh, muh-muh-muh, muh-muh-muh, mah". (cadence needs to be fast but consistent)

This does wonders to loosen things up around the lips, especially if you have "lazy" lips like I do. It can be surprisingly hard to do m's, n's and p's.

Curious to see if that would work for me. My main problem (as well as talking too fast), is that I tend to set my jaw too stiffly when talking, so I am not moving my lower mandible too much. In fact, I actually tend to smile when talking, so my lips are stiff and my jaw is set, which makes enunciation harder.

I would think that having a mouth full of pebbles would tend to make you not want to move your jaw too much, which kind of defeats what I am trying to correct?

This is difficult to describe, but when talking after removing the cork, my tongue feels "stronger" and moves with greater deliberation. I'm unsure what it would due for your jaw but you should certainly give it a try.

Would food in your mouth work?

IMO this article betrays a bit about why and how the author has come to be a fast talker. It has to do with how he distills the information and presents it to the reader.

The article explains a really cool application he put together to automatically transcribe his conference talks and measure the words per minute that he speaks. The problem I see is that he feels it necessary to describe his whole thought process and all his dead ends to arrive at his solution... i.e. he started with ffmpeg, pydub, and SpeechRecognition, then later turns out he didn't need pydub, then later he discovers he misconfigured SpeechRecognition because it was sending a ton of data to an external API, etc.

While this might be mildly interesting, I think the writing would be much more effective without all the dead ends and the spurious details that don't contribute to the thesis.

I am often guilty of not communicating in a simple and effective manner (rambling too much), and thus I tend to speak much faster than I need to due to the sheer amount of content my rambling introduces. This usually works against the goal of communicating effectively with my audience.

I realize I'm trying to project my own perspective onto the author, but I think there is a good chance that a great first step for him might be to simplify and distill his content before he speaks somewhere. This requires more preparation, but it greatly improves the end product (the public speaking).

This reminds me of the research on comparative speed of different languages that ended up finding that the information density was essentially the same for all languages, even if the number of syllables enunciated per second was different.

I felt the same way. Especially when he measured "information" in his talks as a function of the number of words he said. I feel sorry for audiences who have to sit through talks where the speaker believes that the utility of the talk is linearly proportional to the number of words in it. Betrays a profound lack of empathy for the audience, and a lack of understanding of the purpose of a talk.

I talk very fast, especially when caffeinated. From discussing this with people in my life I have come to believe that I speak via a different mental process than some other people. Which is interesting.

Namely: my verbal brain races ahead of the rest of my brain, and seems to think better than my internal monologue. It seems smarter and better able to make connections than when I think on my own, as if my brain is wired in a verbal-first way.

From speaking to others I think there is some discrete variation in this property. Some people's internal monologues, or maybe it's their 'writing' brain, is more heavily wired into their intelligence than their verbal brain. Some people speak slowly and deliberately and dislike fast-talkers because they run a more complicated mental process to formulate and process language than I do.

I was never able to articulate this, thank you. It seems I think better when talking (very fast) than when writing or thinking. Why is that?

Speaking different languages also changes your verbal tracing. I heard agglutination languages like German does this to you and so do Tamil speakers which also uses agglutination

If anyone is interested, here are a couple of other qualities that might be correlated with this one. I wonder if anyone else sees the same patterns:

- aphantasia (not seeing images in my head) - being of eastern-european / ashkenazi jewish descent - reading a ton as a child instead of socializing - liking intuitive reasoning and geospatial reasoning, such as physics over logic, algebra over analysis (within math), higher-level languages over systems-level ones, and OOP over functional programming - being very distractable / ADD and easily addicted to things like video games

That's interesting - my girlfriend seems to very much fit the description. Would you say you have difficulty formulating full arguments in your head? Do you talk when you think by yourself? When "thinking" aloud by talking to someone you're bound to sometimes stray and perhaps need to take a different line of reasoning to make a coherent argument. Does it pose a challenge to not get attached (maybe defensive) to what you said for this process to be efficient? - especially before someone whose opinion matters to you; or in an argument.

I feel like I experience this in a similar way to yourself.

I also struggle to see images in my head sometimes, I am mostly of european decent (German/Czechia on one side - Australian/English on the other side). Loved reading as a child, although I wouldn't say instead of socialising but I read a lot more than was typical.

Couple this with an addictive personality. I really get into sports, activities, and video games. Obsessed with them for months at a time. I love the idea of building xxx app/business - but I rarely stick with these through to completion. Almost as if I get all the joy and enjoyment from the formulation of ideas and the beginning of the journey but get over it quickly and move on to something else.

Yup relate on most of these qualities, including Eastern European, but no Jew via DNA test at least, but anecdotally maybe.

yeah, I have no idea which attributes might be the 'cause', and probably a lot of HNers probably match a lot of that anyway. But it's interesting to be on the lookout for correlations.

I believe there was a research showing that verbalizing helps people think. I always think aloud for hard issues. (underrated perk of remote work, you can talk to yourself without looking crazy).

This is my problem. I think faster than I can talk, and sometimes I am a whole sentence ahead in my brain than what is coming out of my mouth.

As well as making me talk faster and harder to understand, a lot of times people I am talking to tend to disconnect from what I am saying purely because I am disconnecting from what I am saying myself.

Side story: Just the other morning I was walking around my neighbourhood when I bumped into a friend. My brain was debating whether I should say "Good Morning Natasha" or "Hey Tash" and what came out of my mouth was "Gmrly Nash". Definitely a race condition happening there, which is often the case.

Try some meditation. It sounds like you are getting way too many thought grabbing your attention and you are trying to compensate by talking fast.

I used to almost exclusively speak very quickly. I've been intentionally slowing down for years. A helpful exercise for this is to convert all of your words to their most simplistic synonyms when you speak with people, such that ever younger audiences can understand you.

i also do this and say stupid shit i never knew it was possible to actually think before you talk

Interesting indeed. I talk very fast too, generally. In my presentations and talks(only few I had given), I used to talk fast and people will loose interest in the talk. I got many good feedback to slow down a bit, I did it by adding pauses at relevant points (still in practice).

I have kind of two hypothesis especially for me. Why I talk fast?

a) My local/native language is fast paced. May be due that in English too I am talking fast.

b) My mother also talks very fast. May be I got certain traits from her.

It's not really about speed, it's about rhythm, density, presentation style, and audience.

When I was in competitive public speaking and debate, I spoke at about 200 wpm. However, those speeches were all pre-scripted to the letter, so I had control over the density and presentation. I could script a rhythm of speech that allowed an audience to keep up without feeling overtasked.

When I presented from notes, like in debate, or like a presentation such as the author was giving, I spoke a little slower because I had to "choreograph" the rhythm and density on the fly.

And obviously, it really depends on your audience. This is sorta a given, but the more knowledgeable they are, the denser your presentation can be. Obviously you still need a good rhythm, else you'll lose the audience.

The purpose of a speaking rhythm is almost like a mental slide that you are constructing over the course of the talk. You want it to be smooth and to take the audience where you want them to be. There are no problems with going down the slide at speed. But if you have no rhythm, it's like putting bumps and corners in it.

So basically your speed doesn't matter (within reason) if you have the other elements down. But if you are struggling with the elements of communication, yes, slowing down will "solve" the issue.

I am often bothered that I feel like I am rushing to speak everything I want to say and often feel like I garble some words as I rush to get everything out.

I dislike it - when given the chance, I actually do like the sound of my own voice! When given the chance it is satisfying to talk slowly, clearly and with nice tone and variations in pitch etc.

I am coming around to the realisation that I think this feeling of needing to rush is because I am surrounded by people who will readily interrupt me given the chance (both family and at work). Meetings over video are the worst - I've taken to willfully just carrying on talking if someone starts to try to interrupt just so I can say my peice.

I often wonder if this level of interruption and the feeling of needing to machine-gun out what I want to say as quickly as possible with the minimum of gaps or pauses is "normal" and everyone gets this, or am I just surrounded by pricks (both at work and at home) who don't care what I have to say?

> I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words.

> That’s 55 words. At my normal conference rate, I’d say that in 16 seconds. At 130 wpm, it’d be 25 seconds

I'd say I speak slowly, and when going for maximum enunciation, that paragraph took me 16 seconds. MacOS text to speech was 18 seconds. I wonder where 130WPM comes from? Seems way too slow.

    $ time say 'I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words.'
    
    real 0m18.822s
    user 0m0.007s
    sys 0m0.006s

I come from Eastern Canada (the island province of Newfoundland, to be exact), where we speak very quickly with a unique dialect that is highly abbreviated. (for example, "What are you doing?" becomes "whattayat?") I find it painfully slow to listen to non-Newfoundlanders speak. Happiest day of my professional life was finding out how to speed up YouTube videos. Default setting for any conference/instructional video is now 1.5-2x speed to just keep things moving.

And the rest of us in Canada would love to figure out how to slow you down so that we can understand what the hell you're saying! :D

This was so cringe. Because so nerd. The social skill of "knowing when I speak too fast" replaced by ML and math.

OK, so "knowing when I speak too fast" is non-deterministic, and totally learnable. Everyone speaks too fast when they start out talking in public. It's not an arcane thing you need to discover metrics for. It's just a social skill that anyone can learn. There's a gazillion online tutorials for doing this, I'm not going to repeat any of them here.

Spending tens of hours measuring exactly how cringe you are is cringe. Everyone is cringe when they start out. Accept that, and learn by getting better. Math is not going to help you. Learning to speak at 120 wpm, but without the natural breaks that public speakers have, is just going to make you sound like a robot.

Excellent natural speakers can pause for up to 30s and it just emphasises what they say.

If you really want to do this, go join an improv comedy club. It'll scare the living shite out of you, but teach you how to speak in public for good.

I used to talk fast. I made an effort to speak more slowly because people didn't understand me, and now I just think slower, which doesn't seem all that great.

I often wonder if listening to podcasts and videos at 1.5x or 2x speed will make me impatient for people talking at normal speeds and whether that will be true for society at large.

I remember in the 80s being overwhelmed by the explosion of stuff to read on usenet and a friend of mine saying that kids who grow up with this tech won't be overwhelmed and will be used to absorbing so much. No idea if he was right.

I once testifed in a court case. The court reporter asked me to speak more slowly. She said she had a hard time recording more than 300 words per minute. I learned I am a fast talker and slow typer.

You have to calibrate your speed for the information density of what you're communicating. Spanish can be spoken at a much higher syllables per minute than English because there is less information per syllable (look at English vs. Spanish translated text for proof). So Spanish speakers are sometimes unintelligible if they try to speak English at Spanish speeds.

Similarly if you're communicating something very complex and novel to an audience you need to slow down vs. if you're just recounting your latest trip to McDonalds.

It reads a bit like, my brain is so fast that it's becoming a problem for me. A bit sheldonesque.

Anyway, when talking to crowds, I think the main thing is to always remember that it's a two way communication; you say something, the crowd reacts, and you move ahead, depending on how the crowd just reacted. Not word by word, exactly, but on overall. You need to sense whether the crowd is with you or not, only then can you know how to pace your presentation, and when to slow down or speed up.

As someone who has a speech impediment, I really speak too fast too, but then thinking back to my speech therapy, there the emphasis was on breathing, with the focus on diaphragmatic breathing, which has the effect of softening the face and jaw, the relaxation of the shoulders and the chest. When I do this, my cadence drops, my words flow better and I can impart what I want so much easier.

Now I have written that down I really should do that more often ;-)

Interesting article too.

In reality, all you need to do is record yourself presenting on video and watch it.

It's all about how fast people can listen, not how fast you talk...

First thought it’s by Andrej Karpathy...

I find the best programmers speak fast. I find programmers who talk slow to be good as well. Has anyone else noticed this?

Yeah and programmers with medium talking speed are the worst!!

No the worst, just meh.. average.

Being able to stream-of-consciousness is good, but being able to preprocess is also good.

I recall reading in Susan Cain's book Quiet that people tend to judge fast-talkers as being more intelligent than their slower talking colleagues.

It's not actually true though, but it's how people are perceived.

I can't remember where she got the information from but if you really wanted to you could probably find that out. :)

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