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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

Judging by length of audiobooks, four hours is the length of the novella long essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld adaptations all come in around 9-10 hours and those are short books that require my full attention due to the wordplay and setup for jokes sometimes being longish. One would have to double the speed and sacrifice comprehension to meet this goal. I had to listen to first hour of some Greg Egan book and the glossary about ten times before I grokked it.

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I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes.

I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours.

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Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.

How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep?

Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?

Some books are easier to read than others. They use more common words, or contain a more traditional narrative that is easy to understand, or both.

> How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed?

Yes, I still have an internal voice when I read (and when I touch type for that matter).

> Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?

- The words are familiar (a counterexample would be any work written in Elizabethan English, since I'll trip over archaic word meanings)

- The organization is such as to make for easy understanding what is happening. Some authors do the opposite as a literary device; highly non-linear works or an extremely unreliably narrator are counterexamples. This does not exclude allegory. Arthur Miller's The Cruicible is a straightforward dramatization of a story in colonial Salem, but is rather transparently an allegory for McCarthyism.

I think that extracting meaning is largely orthogonal to whether prose is light or not. Certainly many important works are intentionally dense, but there's also overly pretentious drivel dressed up in hard-to-understand clothing.

Ist reading faster then listening for everyone?

In my native language, absolutely.

In non-native languages, often not.

One of the interesting things I've found in picking up a few languages is that listening to a foreign language is quite different from reading one.

When listening, especially to a recording (that is, you can't simply ask someone to repeat themselves, though you can usually replay a passage), when I hear a word I don't immediately recognise or am unfamiliar with ... my mind just sort of skips over it. Often I have some idea of meaning (previous encounters, or more often, context), even if that's vague. When reading, however, strange words cause me to stumble and I'll slow considerably. Consequence is that I can listen faster than I can read.

The dual option of listening and reading simultaneously is particularly effective, and I'm fond of options (often podcasts) which offer both audio and text transcripts to read along. This also seems to be more useful for expanding my language skills.

That raises the question: how much faster can we read without speaking, than read aloud? I'm guessing its a number less than 2 times.

I can definitely read 4 times faster in my head than out loud. I've read books to my kid out loud that take like 30 minutes per chapter, and i doubt it would take more than an hour to read the whole book. I read on the faster side though, and don't have an internal monologue.

I can also read about the same speed but I don’t enjoy reading at that speed at all...

For me it's 1:1. I read aloud in my head at the same pace that I speak. It seems slow, but little by little I get through what I need. Also, I don't know how to do it another way. So it goes.

It depends upon the material for me. Sometimes with technical or historical books that are essentially reciting data points then conclusions I can read much faster than 2x because if one is paying attention one kind of knows where the writer(s) are going - though I might repeat or pause to write notes or do online research sometimes to memorize and understand new terminology, but for fiction I have to be in a very specific mindset to imagine all the things going on appropriately with movement and emotion and pondering character motivation and the setting, sometimes I just pause and think about what is being described in my minds eye before moving forward in the text.

My wife asked me this question, since I'm a considerably faster reader than her. We discovered that (if I try reading aloud as fast as possible) I can read aloud faster than she can read without speaking, though my tongue does occasionally trip over words at that speed. I read in my head faster yet.

Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.”

I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower.

I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once.

Looking for references now this is the best I can find:

https://theamericanscholar.org/reading-fast-and-slow/

But I wonder where the speed reading conversation intersects with this notion out of Caltech that we “live at 10 bits per second”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42449602

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