This happened a few weeks ago, another friend posted a pic on facebook showing off her incredible reading spead. This has been happening to me all my life. People telling me how they read books in a night or sometimes people say they've read full books in 2-3 hours time.
I've googled about it, lots of times. How can they do this? I learnt to skim read when I was preparing for aptitude exams, do they skim read entire books? can they do that? then I created new theories, maybe they don't read it too well, maybe they just go with the story and wont remember the details, or they fake read, they skip, they don't enjoy the word associations and sentence forming. They don't see the parts of speech, the prepositions, or don't pay attention at the beauty of the adverbs. All possible theories, I came up with so many things to protect my slow reading pace. But none of them actually made sense. People who read fast, like 10 or 20x faster than me knew the story line better than me, including the details. So whats going on??
More googling lead me to the reason. Its called subvocalisation. Meaning, your actually saying or imagining the words that are being read, or you imagine that you are listening to the words you read in your head. This is called subvocalisation, this imagining the sound of the words is what takes time. Most of our brains are alike, well upto a certain extent, so almost all of us can read at the same speed. But people who subvocalise while reading are spending that extra time to read out or imagine the sound of the words in their head. Hence the slow reading speed.
Next, how do you solve this?
Step1: Google, yeah I googled again and found some really simple techniques. I put them to the test and I gotta say, they have worked, a little albeit.
First, remember how they told in primary school that using fingers to read was bad, unlearn that. It might look uncivil to read with the help of your fingers, but try moving them along the words, it really, really helps reduce subvoculisation.
Second, distract yourself, simple, think of non sense, keep repeating words or listen to non lyrical music. Thinking or saying non sense in your head maybe a little risky, so try to listen to instrumental or play non lyrical music. It will help.
Try these two things, your reading speed will surely improve by atleast 70%.
One needs to remember though, that while scrutinizing documents or while reading technical reports that may have new words that you don't know, subvocalisation helps you remember it. Also, if you want to learn something by heart, subvocalisation can be of help even there. But if you are jealous of your friends who can read books in 2 hours, start practicing these 2 things and you can do it too. Go!
I've googled about it, lots of times. How can they do this? I learnt to skim read when I was preparing for aptitude exams, do they skim read entire books? can they do that? then I created new theories, maybe they don't read it too well, maybe they just go with the story and wont remember the details, or they fake read, they skip, they don't enjoy the word associations and sentence forming. They don't see the parts of speech, the prepositions, or don't pay attention at the beauty of the adverbs. All possible theories, I came up with so many things to protect my slow reading pace. But none of them actually made sense. People who read fast, like 10 or 20x faster than me knew the story line better than me, including the details. So whats going on??
More googling lead me to the reason. Its called subvocalisation. Meaning, your actually saying or imagining the words that are being read, or you imagine that you are listening to the words you read in your head. This is called subvocalisation, this imagining the sound of the words is what takes time. Most of our brains are alike, well upto a certain extent, so almost all of us can read at the same speed. But people who subvocalise while reading are spending that extra time to read out or imagine the sound of the words in their head. Hence the slow reading speed.
Next, how do you solve this?
Step1: Google, yeah I googled again and found some really simple techniques. I put them to the test and I gotta say, they have worked, a little albeit.
First, remember how they told in primary school that using fingers to read was bad, unlearn that. It might look uncivil to read with the help of your fingers, but try moving them along the words, it really, really helps reduce subvoculisation.
Second, distract yourself, simple, think of non sense, keep repeating words or listen to non lyrical music. Thinking or saying non sense in your head maybe a little risky, so try to listen to instrumental or play non lyrical music. It will help.
Try these two things, your reading speed will surely improve by atleast 70%.
One needs to remember though, that while scrutinizing documents or while reading technical reports that may have new words that you don't know, subvocalisation helps you remember it. Also, if you want to learn something by heart, subvocalisation can be of help even there. But if you are jealous of your friends who can read books in 2 hours, start practicing these 2 things and you can do it too. Go!
Interesting thought...just realised tht m pretty fast with reading novels...
ReplyDeleteGood Post shree.. I never knew about the concept of sub-vocalisation.
ReplyDeleteI never knew of this concept of subvocalisation..Thank you for drawing attention to it....but I read fast because I skip irrelevant stuff that I've trained myself to identify :-)
ReplyDeleteYes I do subvocalisation... Mostly we do it when the language we read isn't our mother tongue or naturally learnt languages. As most will say even while speaking a phoren language we learnt we do a translation of thoughts in between to our mother tounge. Yupp that often reduces our fluency of speaking just like I guess subvocalisation wud make u a slower reader. But it has its own merit. I don't think I'd like to do away with it. Oh n btw I took abt 1 n half min to read ur post. Dunno if that's fast or not. I'll let u b d judge. To conclude its really nicely written piece. And I often find if the subject is of interest ur reading speeds wud b much faster subvocalisation or not.
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