Missing Prereq on Speed-Reading

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Icelander

As far as I know, speed reading depends on being able to read well enough so that it is not necessary to vocalise sounds while doing so. I can speed-read in Icelandic and English, but I can't do so in Danish, Latin, German, Spanish or French. If I need to concentrate to read a text at all, I can't speed-read it.

I suspect you're conflating two different factors here. One is whether your brain processing actually performs vocalization routines. Other is whether your processing goes on as a conscious skill or a non-conscious one.

I'm not a neuro-scientist of any sort, so I'd better be careful with trying to make a more specific explanation.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Lord Carnifex

Since this thread is undead and roaming the Earth anyway, I'd like to take a crack at it.

Call it a house rule if you like, but I'd require literacy for Speed Reading, and in fact never noticed that it wasn't listed as a pre-req. I took a speed reading class once, and I'd say the techniques learned probably wouldn't carry over to a language or orthography I didn't know. One of the major techniques (in English with a printed Roman alphabet, anyway) is to read only the top half of every line, because Roman letters, for the most part, can be identified by the top half alone. I wouldn't assume this is true in all writing systems. Another technique is to learn to read entire words instead of letters; this leads to the phenomenon where, as long as all the letters of a word are present, and the first and final letter in a word are in place, the sentence is still decipherable.

I speak only a tiny amount of Russian, but I can sound out Cyrillic. But I am nowhere as fast with Cyrillic text that I am with English. I firmly believe one must be capable of interpreting the language of a text before one can speed read it. I

I read plenty fast, and my method is kind of special, and not something really conscious: I don't actually pay conscious attention to the letters, or even the words. what I do, is look at the area around the line I'm reading, so that when I get to the next line, my subconscious has already started interpreting it. I don't read the letters, or the words, just the text as a whole.