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Reading Speed | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| watupboy101 Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4715 days ago 65 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 7 19 March 2013 at 4:10am | IP Logged |
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(Taken from my post on LingQ)
So these last few days, I've decided to read Harry Potter in Spanish in order to keep myself in touch with the language while acquire vocabulary, not necessarily to "study". My focus now has directed toward French, I haven't "finished" Spanish I have just found myself at a level of basic fluency that I am moderately satisfied with for the time being. Now back to reading, today I was reading a chapter of Harry potter (more or less 4000 words) and it took me nearly an hour. Now my question is, is that fast? Normal? Slow? How quickly can you read? What are some things that can be done to speed up reading comprehension? Just reading more? Not that I'm not content with that pace of reading, I just always know there is room for improvement and would like to find out ways. Now this isn't to debate about how well one can read, it's more about the process of how one can improve their speed of reading. Also this is intensive reading (every unknown word was looked up in an online dictionary) Thanks, hopefully that makes sense it seems a little jumbled. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5897 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 7 19 March 2013 at 8:55am | IP Logged |
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(I deleted my post because I assumed the study language "French" was the one you were trying to improve. oops.) ^^
I would try using the DELE test papers to improve reading comprehension speed. Edited by Sunja on 19 March 2013 at 8:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4469 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 7 19 March 2013 at 9:10am | IP Logged |
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I can read pretty quickly, to the point that I used to get a new stack of library books every week :)
But in language learning, speed isn't everything. With new languages, I usually read at 2 different speeds. The "normal" for me speed is for extensive reading paired with listening to audiobook or at least text-to-speech, to get a ton of input, to get the repetition of the commonly used words, phrases, verb tenses... Then, there is the "slow, crawling" speed when doing intensive reading - looking up every unknown word, reading and sometimes repeating sentences or phrases aloud. I wouldn't see the time you have spent on reading the one chapter as a problem. The speed will pick up with practice. You may want to re-read the chapter again, this time going through it without looking anything up. Choose the method how you read depending on what you want to improve. For general understanding, reading fast and getting the gist is enough. But to improve your active language, slow, intensive reading and noticing details is needed. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6394 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 7 19 March 2013 at 9:27am | IP Logged |
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Someone once suggested reading with a metronome to improve reading speed. Not sure how one would go about that, is it one tick per line? I think it might be of some use to try to read at a slightly faster pace than is natural sometimes, in order to force oneself to speed up the processing. Don't let the brain take as much time as it wants, but rather put some pressure on it to speed up and it will improve. I haven't done much in the area myself, though.
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| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4451 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 5 of 7 19 March 2013 at 10:05am | IP Logged |
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If you looked up every unkown word, then it was not particularly slow. I don't know how many words you had to look up, but I guess you will have spent a fair amount of the time typing the unknown words and reading the "answer". As Majka says, it depends on what your purpose is. If your prime objective is to enjoy the book and get the gist without necessarily understanding every word, you will only look up those words that you have to understand in order to get the meaning of a phrase. That would probably increase the speed considerably. However, if your main aim is to acquire new vocabulary, the intensive approach you describe seems a good one.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 7 19 March 2013 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
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I always read at the same speed. If I really want to know all the details I will read the text over a few times, then I will automatically catch all the details. This is for a language I can speak and read well, so one of the six in my "basic fluency + list", although my Russian is somewhat slower (but it works).
For anything else extensive reading is a bit more complicated. However I can extensively understand a fair bit of Romanian when reading. Hebrew not so much. Breton I use too little but I probably could do better (and also worse). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5595 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 7 of 7 19 March 2013 at 1:52pm | IP Logged |
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I know this problem well. If you know and like the LR technique, try turning it round and
listening to the English audiobook while reading the Spanish. Keeping up with the audiobook forces you to read much faster and not get hung up on minor details. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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