HN Explorer

Ask HN: At what speed do you watch educational videos?

8 points by bewe42 ↗ HN
When learning a new technical skill, I'm noticing that the time I spend watching videos instead of reading books is growing. But I almost always consume videos at a speed of 1.25x or 1.5x or sometimes even more. I don't think I lose anything by doing this, in fact, I feel I can learn quicker this way, especially if the video is of high quality (I could be wrong). I rather pause a video when I need to think about something than playing it at the original speed. I find that curious and wonder what this means for how we communicate and learn.

Are you doing this also?

10 comments

[ 3151 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] thread
[dead] hiaux0
Yes. When I started to learn Webdevelopment through a course on Udemy I would be playing the video on 1.5 to 2 times speed. Most of the time everything said is of no difficulty and I would also pause and think if needed. Since then I speed up almost every video I watch. I prefer to turn on subtitles if available.

In this fast progressing world it is better to get to the critical part as fast as possible and "watching videos in higher speed and not lose its message" is definitely a skill I want to enhance.

muzani
I do it at the maximum speed whenever possible, around 2x. I can just pause and rewind whenever.

Personally not a fan of videos to learn. I usually learn faster from books because of speed reading. Speeding up videos makes them tolerable for me.

afarrell
I sometimes download them and play them with VLC at 90% speed so my note-taking and diagramming can keep up. Either that or I just pause repeatedly. If it is review, I’ll play at 1.5 or 2x though.

I wish online video platforms had a 90% option because it would make it more enjoyable for my wife to watch history videos with me.

supermdguy
1.5x to 2x, with pauses whenever I get confused. I think it's just because talking intelligibly is slower than thinking.
Rainymood
2x usually. Rewatch at 1.0x or 1.5x if I didn't get something.
zacurry
My preferred mode is book, especially for hard concepts.

I uusually view videos at 1.0x . I find them hard to learn from as my mind keeps wandering. I tried with 2.0x , it still didn't work for me.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)