/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8178632

Speed reading?

I've actually got something for this.

I'm working on a Japanese learning app and I stumbled onto the fact that Japanese readers can speed read incredibly fast, like pages in seconds, because Japanese kanji uses pictographs, ideographs and images; so Japanese readers get a snapshot by just looking at a page.

We read English in a similar manner. Children learn to read words by stringing letters together, but as you become more proficient at reading English the words are actually formed into silhouettes. So our brain takes a shortcut by looking at the first letter of the word, the last letter of the word, and the general shape of the word.

For icntnsae, if I wtroe a sntnecee lkie this it wloud siltl be rbdealae. In cfta, neev isht si llsti beareadl whti a titlel bit of toefrf, but it's a lot more difficult because the general structure of the word is scrambled.

The best way to learn to speed read, is to draw blotted out silhouettes of words and put them into sentences you have memorised, and just read them over and over again until you get an instinctive feel for the shape of the word, rather then what the letters say.

I'll add a speed reading app to my list and I'll see what I can do.