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Comment by bvi | Hacker News Reader

What techniques do you use? I read at around 600wpm, and increasing it by 50-100% seems pretty daunting.

I trained a bit speed reading when I was in higschool from some book that was translated from Russian (sorry, no idea what was the book) the main idea there was to: 1) not saying words with inner voice 2) not reading letter by letter (seeing whole word at once) 3) reading by connected words not only word by word 4) there was eye training exercise, the idea was that you had to train vision a bit to be able to read more text with less eye movement, i.e. to read word by word you have to be able to see whole word at once (so your brain recognizes word with 1 lookup, not letter-by-letter lookup) whether this helped - I don’t now but that spreeder says that I can read more than 1500 wpm on casual texts (when there is a lot of material I want to realy comprehend, ofcourse it is slower even by factor of 3)

I have no idea what speed I read at but it's weird seeing this stated... I never imagined anyone but a 4 year old would do 1 and 2 and would have thought that 3 and 4 were basically just normal adult reading. I did read a lot when I was a kid

It is a normal transition for childhoods filled with reading. I read about 10k pages a year until I graduated university.

For a hacker, it is normal to not subvocalize.

I think it is also one of the reasons that we hate meetings so much. An email can be written at about 40 wpm, and read much, much, much faster. So past 2 or 3 people, the dominant strategy should be text, unless sidechannel meaning is needed (where emotions are involved or whatever).

"1) not saying words with inner voice"

That's been debunked a while ago. There's no such thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

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