šŸ”– Determine Your "Characters Per Second" English Reading Speed [a 5-minute experiment]

Cool test. I got 1’56, so 116 seconds, speed 32,5.

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28,8 cps, it seems like a good pace.

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@Irmar - I can’t believe it - I also got 32.5 characters per second. And I can’t stop myself from saying the words as I read which slows me down tremendously. I used to read silently but ever since I started reading Korean I got into the bad habit of mouthing the words – even if my lips don’t move, I know I am doing it it my head to listen to my own terrible pronunciation of Korean
If there are an average of 5 characters per word, the 32.5 is about 400 words/ minute which is about right – my speed when I was in college so surprisingly I’m not reading a lot slower than when I was young.

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Very impressive. That’s twice as fast as what I achieved. I’ll have to have a word with the storyteller inside my mind who insists on reading aloud and savouring every word he encounters.

Very impressive! So far, I’m the slowest reader in this experiment (and I can only speak English).

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This is exactly what happens for me. While I can turn off the voice in my mind, I find it more satisfying to let it continue.

I started out with reading the words in my head but halfway through the text I started to ignore the voice and read faster.

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Ah, that explains it! I noticed that I tend to give a very quick glance to the whole sentence or sub-sentence and then proceed to read it, it helps understand faster what you’re reading because you more or less know what to expect.

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Thanks, Irmar. I’ll try this out and see how it goes.

Because a very large chunk of my life involved reading physics, chemistry, maths and music theory textbooks, I developed a technique whereby I’d first read through a chapter’s headings, sub-headings and captions for images and graphs. Then I’d go back through the chapter and read the first paragraph in each sub-section since it is usually the opening paragraph of a section that provides the most important information. After that, I scanned through the chapter. This is similar to what you describe. Just as you say, this kind of approach assisted my understanding. I found that it also boosted my memory retention enormously.

What I find really curious is that it has never once occurred to me to approach reading novels and non-technical books like this. I’m looking forward to trying it out! Thank you :slight_smile:

–Manganese

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