Learning The Art Of Reading Faster

By Author: Rongg Goran
Total Articles: 4
Comment this article

Reading is a skill like any other. Most children in the West learn to read early in life and so after 4 or 5 years of schooling they have the skill to read just about any text in their mother tongue. This is because the Roman alphabet is made up of 21 consonants and 5 vowels. (Y is counted as a consonant although it has a sound and can act as a vowel). Once those are all learned then it is possible to pronounce every word ever written.

This isn't true in languages not using the Roman alphabet. Japanese for example has two tables of syllables each 48 characters long and then they also use accents on some of the letters to change the sound. One is for Japanese words and one is for the pronunciation of foreign words which have been brought into the Japanese language. Japanese children are taught these first but then have to learn the 1945 Characters any 2 of which are used together to make up a word. It is very difficult and most Japanese children emerging from 12 years of schooling have spent half their school life learning to be literate. Chinese children don't even have the 'kana to help them. This has massive disadvantages ...
... in every sense except 1. Japanese writing is much more concise and reading it is a lot faster. In fact under their system they are able to compress a 100 page document into between 50 and 60 pages, and reading that 60 page document faster that a normal reader in English could read 60 pages of an English document.

But this is not necessarily the case. The way most people are taught to read is fairly straightforward: Open the text on Page 1, Read the Title, read the 1st paragraph, silently vocalising each word, check our comprehension of what we have just read, move onto paragraph 2. Read it in the same way, sub vocalising and checking our own comprehension and the logic involved if paragraph 2 follows on from Paragraph 1. Carry on in this manner until the text being read is completed.

In this manner we can read and appreciate the brilliance of the literature and learn from the written word if learning was the objective. Great, you have read every word in a 1,000 or 10,000 word document But It is not the most efficient use of your time. If one could improve one's reading speed think of the benefits that you would gain. For a start you would find your comprehension would improve. Yes strangely enough going through the text quickly improves rather than hinders comprehension. Next you would find that you wouldn't need to read every word to have a full and complete grasp of the text.

These techniques, plus other are learned skills and can be taught. Learning How To Read Faster will train you in a number of different techniques each of which on their own will improve your reading speed but when combined will make a monumental difference to the number of books, documents, emails and articles you can absorb.