Ask HN: How do you increase your listening speed without losing comprehension? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you increase your listening speed without losing comprehension?

4 pointsnewsbinator6 comments

I now listen to podcasts at ~2.7x with extreme silence trimming and I can't seem to break past this speed level.

I have to slow it down to 2.4x for speakers with even minor less-familiar accents.

I'd like to get to a general 3.5x speed if possible, although hours and years of practice have still left me at my current plateau.

I am not a blind person (they can comprehend speech at incredible speeds). I'd like to be able to do other things while listening at high speed (e.g. walking or doing dishes).

How do you increase your listening speed without losing comprehension?

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I know nothing about this, I just use 2x which is usually the max on my companies employee info videos.

Are you feeling like there is a wall at 2.700? Can you gradually increase to 2.71, 2.72, etc?

Can you listen to the same recording a second time at a faster speed to train? Or the same person in a new recording? Individuals vary their speed, one guy I noticed sounds completely normal at 2x just because he’s a drawler. I think you’d need a consistent speaker to retrain on in order to measure your progress.

You want to do dishes and walk, but closing your eyes and shutting out other senses is probably a good way to go faster at the expense of multitasking.

Edit: another thing is that the x speed has diminishing returns just like speeding. 2x cuts time in half, but 4x only saves you half as much time, so you’re really not saving as much as you might think but getting to higher and higher speeds. Going from 10x to 20x if possible would only save you 3 seconds over a minute of listening. Going at 2.7x you have already saved 63% of the conceivable time savings.

You've pretty much said anything I would have. Having heard the speed at which blind people's text-to-speech goes, I'd say that likely represents some kind of cap. I'd imagine that all factors being optimized, time and practice would be the only way to faster speeds.

I listen to media at 4 to 5x speed usually, not blind either. I've found that I just got better at incrementally increasing the speed over time. Why not try 2.71 or something like that and just acclimate to it?

Immersion reading really helped me. Read and listen at the same time. Kindle does it really nicely, but you can diy it as well. Just grab some audiobooks and their pdfs and start your audiobooks at a comfortable speed and slowly try to increase the speed. It is transferable as well. After a couple of books you’ll hopefully notice that you can both listen in higher speeds as well as read a bit faster as well assuming similar material and narrators ofc.

I find I miss out on important ideas when listening at high speeds. Some podcasts I listen to more than once. I guess it depends on the content really

you are already going fast what more you want from 2.7x speed

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