Speed Reading apps

[icebear]

Just caught this article on Spritz via my Facebook network and found the test in English pretty cool. At the same time, couldn't help but wonder how badly it would butcher Chinese segmentation. Also, its just for Samsung products, so no good for me.

 

Spent a bit of time searching and checking reviews before giving Velocity a try. I bought it expecting it only to work with already segmented text, and planned just to experiment with it in English. I already use Instapaper very frequently so the "trainsition pain" was relatively low in that regard - it does a good job importing text. For English its very similar to what the Spritz article shows, less the coloring.

 

On a lark I gave a Chinese news article a try - and it seemed to segment decently (not that I can judge with certainty). Had my Chinese girlfriend take a look and she didn't spot any segmentation errors in the few articles she read. For now, seems it handles the task well.

 

I previously have written about how useful I found other apps that scrolled text at a set pace to force my reading speed up somewhat - although I'm often bothered by the need to segment in your brain (which absolutely is a skill), especially as the ratio of new words increases. This class of app seems to help out with that quite a bit, so I thought I'd share.

 

A few quick thoughts:

+ Focus strictly on reading, not segmentation or looking up vocabulary.

+ Understand exactly how fast your reading/comprehension speed is, and adjust/challenge as needed.

+ Good integration with several programs for saving online content (e.g. Instapaper) - convenient if you already use those. Coupled with Chinese websites that have chapters online in text form, even better.

- No lookup, so must select text that is "extensive" or "easier" - for me that'd be news articles.

- Fail to train your subconscious "segmentation" skill.

- Spend too much time looking at a back-lit screen rather than paper/e-ink.

- Not possible to use with DRM ebooks.

 

Clearly both pros and cons in my view. I'm going to experiment with using this in the coming days/weeks and see how useful it is or isn't - at the very least for speeding up reading of short articles that I likely have a very solid grasp of vocab-wise.

 

Any thoughts from our resident reading champs on the forum? I understand it may not be worth the cost to experiment on the iOS app I linked, but there are free alternatives in browsers - such as this one. Unfortunately those free alternatives seem to butch segmentation - so just good for getting an idea of the usage in English.

[imron]

Speed reading is something I've been interested in for ages, and I'm also currently developing software specifically designed to help Chinese learners increase reading speed.  Most of the stuff that is out there is pretty poor from a Chinese learning perspective because they rely on words being separated by spaces, so you need to have pre-segmented text if you want them to work.
 

I understand it may not be worth the cost to experiment on the iOS app I linked

$2.99 is not exactly going to be breaking the bank!  But for those who would like to play around with this sort of thing for free, there are several firefox (and presumably Chrome) plugins that do this too.  This is one that I quite like, but it doesn't work for Chinese.

[icebear]

Gave this a try with my morning news reading. To be clear - I'm very comfortable with business/economics articles already, so rarely encounter unknown words. I think this tool would totally derail an pleasure or utility if used on texts with too much new vocab.

 

11 articles

16113 characters

27 minutes

----

= 597 cpm

 

According to old posts, that's in the upper range of native readers. I wonder how fast a native reader could scream through text with this tool?

 

In the Velocity app I used the 360 wpm setting - which makes sense for a ~500-600 cpm result, since most words are two characters, followed by 1 character-words. For me, the format is incredibly useful, as I have to skim a lot of news everyday for work, and like to maintain that habit even if not obligated. I probably would have taken over an hour, maybe 90 minutes, to read the same material on a computer screen in standard format. I didn't feel there was any sacrifice in comprehension over my normal reading, actually maybe marginally better since I really looked at every single word instead of just skipping past some. I tried moving the speed down a bit (250-300 wpm, or I guess ~450 cpm) and that felt like a crawl, but very high comprehension/absorption.

 

On Imron's suggestion I checked out some plugins for Chrome - Spreed is useful for English so far. 700 wpm is very comfortable in English. Will keep my eyes open for a Chinese compatible Chrome plugin. If anyone out there develops a desktop app or browser plugin (wink wink programmers out there) that could do the above with decent segmentation I would at the least use it everyday at work and find it quite valuable.

 

For now I doubt I would use it for pleasure reading, but for business related material, or anything that I'd just skim anyway (e.g. news), it seems like an incredible time saver.

 

Another suggestion - Instapaper integration with Velocity requires a paid subscription, while using the very similar Pocket service is free (for now). Use of a service like this makes it easy to queue up material, read as convenient, and load into a program to build unknown vocab lists either before or after using with the speed reading app. Pocket seems to have a decent "tagging" system also, which is useful for organizing articles relevant to my job (or perhaps to your studies!).

[imron]

If anyone out there develops a desktop app or browser plugin (wink wink programmers out there) that could do the above with decent segmentation I would at the least use it everyday at work and find it quite valuable.

It's something I'm working on, and the segmentation engine will be based on the stuff I've developed for my text analyser.  In the meantime, as a bit of a lengthy workaround, you could use the document exporter to spit out segmented html, which you could then load in the browser and use with the speed reading plugins.  To do this, open a file in CTA then go File->Export->To File->Document and set:

 

pre document: <html><head></head><body>

post document: </body></html>

pre paragraph: <p>

post paragraph: </p>

 

And then set the 'post word' to a single blank space.

 

Exporting this will give you a basic html file that you can then open in browser and use with the speed readers - make sure to adjust the speed reader so it only shows 1 word at a time.  It's a bit clutzy, and the punctuation still gets in the way, but it seems to work ok.

[icebear]

Decent online speed reader with Chinese segmentation: http://dheera.net/proto/fastchinese/

 

Main weakness is that it doesn't follow conventional measurement of speed, has fixed max/min speeds. Also would nice for them to make it a plugin, but as a test its pretty decent.