Fluency in Reading: How long for a decent reading speed?

[phills]

On 7/27/2015 at 1:51 PM, Rufus said:

It's even harder for second-language learners to turn this off in Chinese because (I believe) we not only sub-vocalize the pronunciation but also the tones. By doing so, it helps us to train our brain to automatically speak out the right tones. The down side is that this does a lot to slow down our reading speed. 

 

Solution? When you read, try to eliminate the pronunciation and tones in your mind and focus on simply "comprehending" the text.

 

I was looking through old threads on speeding up reading speed, and this tip is gold!

 

You instantly feel yourself going 50%->100% faster when you ignore whether you're pronouncing things correctly, including right tones.   Your brain feels like it's on jet fuel, and you just string together pure "meaning".  But, the instant you catch yourself doing this, you lose your rhythm and you slow down again. 

 

Upon more lucid consideration, you feel like maybe you're wasting your "reading opportunity" to improve your pronounciation / overall Chinese skills.  You wonder whether you are reinforcing bad pronounciation / incorrect associations (I'm pretty sure I misread a bunch of characters not essential to the meaning, e.g. in filler text between dialog lines, 听 for 近, because I expected to see 听). 

 

So like any other trick, there may be a trade-off to this.  I'm not sure it's worth applying yet, just to save time, unless you feel like there's nothing else to gain from your reading time.  I feel like I'm still learning sentence parsing, grammar, word choice, vocab, correct pronounciation/tones, from my regular reading experience, that I don't get from this.

 

But I'm saving down this tip for my pipeline...  Now I see where the next quantum leap in speed can come from.

 

Beyond this, I know there's another order of magnitude in speed from "chunking", basically memorizing 2 characters or 4 characters at a time / maybe more, but you can't do that without a lot of reading.  Maybe 10 million characters worth (~60 novels), from the other thread.

[Rufus]

@phills Wow, yeah, that comment was a long time ago!  But yeah, just trying to turn off your subvocalization increases reading speed in any language. 

 

One tip to do this that I've come across is to take your tongue and put the tip on the roof of your mouth and consciously keep it there while you read. It can help you turn off that dialogue and focus on just reading and comprehending. Try doing it in English to practice. 

 

Good luck!

[phills]

Thanks @Rufus.  That tip really gives me hope. 

 

I don't need to physically stop myself yet.  Just not thinking of tones/sounds already shaved a bunch of cognitive effort from my reading. 

 

It's not so much the vocalization for me, it's the urge to make sure it's correct so I'm not "reinforcing" a bad pronunciation.  I was correcting myself as I read (playing both student & teacher in my head). 

 

I certainly don't correct myself in my head when I'm reading English.  It just never occurred to me to care. 

 

When I realized I can also not care in Chinese, then zoom!  But of course, I kind of do care, so I'm phasing it in...