Ask HN: Have you had success with improving your reading speed?

I am a very fast reader and it's something I picked up by being an avid reader, no meme technique snake oils, just churning through 1 - 2 books a day in my teens, some of them of highly technical nature.

So becoming a faster reader was just a function of reading for me, the more I read the faster I read. My starting point was 1-2 books a week if that, and it took a couple of years of reading until I could do it in a day.

I'd focus more on reading comprehension, doesn't really matter how fast you speed through Dostoevsky if you simply don't understand it and I fail to see the point of being faster if it's not predicated first on understanding the text.

Talking here from my experience. I didn't succeed much in making myself read faster, but when it's come to listening I've easily trained myself to consume most of the content at 3x speed and for some fiction books I can go even faster depend on who is reading and quality of recording.

This obviously wouldn't work for reading technical documentation, but if you watch some educational videos on programming on something you can also easily handle 2-3x when watching video lectures. Though getting used to high-speed video is harder.

Most importantly listening at high speed is super easy to learn. You just starting listen some podcasts or books at 1.1 and gradually increase the speed by 0.1x each time you certain that current speed is comfortable for you. In two weeks you'll certainly handle 2x with no problem at all.

PS: My personal record is listening whole The Expanse book at 4.5x, but it was only possible because I was just laying with my eyes closed and enjoyed the ride. Of course I only listen at 2-3x speed when doing something at home or walking outside.

Not every book needs a detailed reading of every word. If you are reading poetry or a key technical book, sure, you will need to focus on each word but there are lot of books where either you can assume lot of filler (business books, light fiction etc..) or where you are familiar with the subject matter that skimming works best. You can always narrow and focus in small sections if needed. I suppose the real lesson is to not feel guilty of skimming as most books are not worth the time to do detailed reading. The other major time saving is to bail out of a book without feeling guilty. If you frame your repulsion to skimming as wasting time you might find skimming more acceptable.

Some years ago an FT columnist assessed that even the most voracious reader can possibly only ready 5000 books in their lifetime. You should be thoughtful on where you want to spend you focus on.

https://www.ft.com/content/79bfc92a-e3e7-11e7-97e2-916d4fbac...

Two simple ways:

1. Read more

2. Use a finger or bookmark to help guide you.

Speedreading techniques or consuming too fast just seems redundant to me. While I’ve been able to comprehend a good amount at a fast speed, it just isn’t enjoyable.

If you shut off your internal monologue and read by just looking at the words (instead of vocalizing them in your head) you can dramatically improve your speed and not lose any value.

It's like reading music, you just look at it and understand it. I think slow reading speeds might be a function of how we're taught to read, because when you learn music etc it's entirely different.

IMO it’s not a good idea. I feel like I hurt my reading comprehension and enjoyment by learning speed reading techniques.

Now the temptation is always there to speed up on a few paragraphs and it’s hard not to.

You're trying to read faster by holding on tighter. It's never going to work. I struggled with the same thing. You're sabotaging your own expectations by using words like "skim" and "repulse". If you're going to improve your reading speed, you need to stop priming yourself for failure.

As another poster said, you should plan to use different reading techniques for different books. Recreational reading is much easier to read super-fast. Textbooks and research papers just aren't. It's similar to how an encryption algorithm works: your brain is really good at finding patterns. You can read faster by letting your brain do the work it's designed to do. Fiction books are very repetitive in their writing style. Technical works aren't; their content is very dense, and there is hardly any repetition. You'll never find easy patterns and repeated words there. They're not very compressible, and they're not very speed-readable.

Speed reading is all about look-ahead, look-behind, and pattern recognition. You are having a hard time because you are trying to force your brain to do it all algorithmically lock-step. Ideally, you want your eyes to maintain a steady rate of scan. Try to avoid using a finger like another poster said; it slows you down in the long-run. Eventually, your brain will start assembling words you have just read with words you're about to read, and give you the sentence in total.

It feels really weird the first times you do it. You're trying to let your brain to do more of the repetitive processing on its own, without you explicitly telling it to do that.

It takes a lot of practice. It's achievable. Keep pushing yourself, but you need to relax while you're doing it. It's a very delicate and tricky balance to achieve, if you're starting out as a slogging reader.

> The idea of reading only 5 words in 8 repulses me.

Go to Project Gutenberg. Find a 100+ year old book that you're not going to get preemptively sentimentally attached to. Practice accelerating your reading with that.

That is exactly how I broke myself of the extremely self-limiting habit of having to subvocalize every single word like I'm still in kindergarten.

I have ADHD, so reading is painstakingly slow. I still want to and enjoy reading, though, so I have also looked for ways to improve my reading speed.

I’ve tried for years, and ultimately it has come at the detriment of reading comprehension and my enjoyment.

I am actively in the process of reading books lovingly. I am trying not to care how long it takes me to get through a book, and to just enjoy what I’m reading. It’s tough, but has improved the experience for me.

I mean, speed reading is basically skimming (but without skipping words, if it makes any sense) and indeed, you won't be able to properly appreciate minor word choices in literary work. For me, speed reading is basically letting your subconscious brain absorb the words, instead of your conscious part. I once cheesily described it as "reading with your heart". You won't miss the feeling of the story, or the general content of a technical post, but you'll miss these tiny linguistical choices.

But opposite to what people are saying here, I find speed reading is great for technical documentation or for the first reading of a technical book. In pair programming sessions it's quite obvious because people will waste time reading SO answers that are obvious dead ends, for instance...

Why do you need to read books faster? What's the hurry?

I recommend checking out the book "Train Your Brain for Success" by Roger Seip. There is a section in this book that teaches you to read faster while improving your reading comprehension.

> The idea of reading only 5 words in 8 repulses me.

One of the biggest concepts in the speed-reading section of the book is that a lot of people sub-vocalize the words in their heads. This limits your reading speed to around 150wpm. If you want to read 450+wpm, you have to be willing to "fill in the gaps" as you read.

Sounds like a depth-first vs. breadth-first problem to me.

No. I'm still bound by my comprehension rate, even though I can "read" (that is, recognize the words) very quickly.

My reading backlog was so large I finally decided to just skim a few books and pull out the most important parts, and ended up remembering more from those books than when I try to read every word.

I'm not sure how fast I read, but my SO used to read a lot faster than me. I did some searching online and found a couple of techniques and now I'm slightly faster than my SO. But I, too, find magic in minor word choice, and when I'm reading quickly and encounter something good I slow down and savor it. I re-read it multiple times. I read it aloud. But I'm able to read much faster on average than I did before, and I MUCH prefer it. So don't be afraid you'll lose out on something just because you're reading faster. In fact, you'll be able to read more in the same amount of time, and therefore you'll get to experience more magic.

Had several friends get deep into speed reading in college, back when Tim Ferris and other self-help gurus in their early days were pushing it as a life hack.

They all abandoned it later when they finally accepted that the learning bottleneck wasn’t their ability to move their eyes across the page as fast as possible.

If you have too much material, pick the specific chapters and subjects you want to read most and start there. Don’t compromise everything just to see it all.

What is the point of reading fast? It degrades the value you get out of it. Might as well just read some notes or reviews or summaries written by other people.

Obviously reading fast is better than reading slow, but if you're going to read faster than you can think / process the content, I don't think that's useful.

Here’s a cool trick that popped up here a while ago: https://bionic-reading.com/

It seems that if you bold the first half of every word, it’s much easier to read quickly.

I took a speed reading course in middle school and it sped up my ability to read quickly. Most of the course was practicing a technique where you use your fingers to highlight the text, so that your eyes could focus (similar to bionic reading).

But it really only works for non-fiction and easy fiction, so it worked really well for standardized testing.

have you looked into bionic reading? it anchors your eyes to only the first letters of the word and help you speed through the next, there are chrome extensions for it if it was implemented on your reader yet, assuming its digital

1. Practice reading without subvocalizing the words in your head

2. Read sections, lines, or blocks of text at a time instead of word by word.

3. Use your hand/fingers/ruler/index card/etc as a guide to help focus on each line at a time, until you can do the above without them.

4. Read more, practice the above

Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics books discuss these in more depth.

At the cost of comprehension yes

I focus on understanding what I read, speed is secondary.

So, depending on the text I read, I adjust the speed.

Best speed reading technique is actually to just skip the boring bits - the fluff that most nonfiction books include to move the narrative between ideas or to reiterate a point. Combine that with note taking and you have a very powerful reading technique. Same thing for most fiction, because a lot of words are spent on exposition and to get a character to/from a scene.

There’s certain kinds of dense nonfiction this doesn’t work for (dense because it doesn’t have filler), or literary nonfiction (that you can slowly savor for the writing or narrative).

I used to relish a choice set of words to describe an idea in a way that just makes it click for me, but I’ve found that (a) this doesn’t lose that because a well written sentence that doesn’t communicate anything of substance is actually a bad sentence (style over substance), and that most sentences (in nonfiction) are pretty bad, and that’s ok. Moreover, I’ve found that simpler writing ends up being more effective, regardless of any personal preferences for Cormac McCarthy-like prose.