tl;dr since this is a huge post:
- Reading faster = good
- Actual reading speed number can be misleading
- You can skip most of the post but read the "tips" section if you want to raise your reading speed
I know the title sounds a bit like clickbait… and it kinda is, but it's also true in some way. I'm an experienced reader, I've been reading Japanese books for a few years now, I'm definitely not a beginner and I'm very comfortable reading pretty much anything. My bookmeter shows what kind of stuff I read, just to give you an idea.
In August, I decided to set myself a challenge and measure how many characters I read every day, and how fast, and my goal for each day would be to reach at least 15,000 characters, for a total of 465000 (15k * 31) characters. I did this, because I wanted to tackle my backlog of books, but also to keep track of my reading speed and try to figure out why I am so slow at reading compared to a lot of my peers.
I never really cared about reading speed and I always thought it was just some pointless stat-driven thing that takes away from actually enjoyable media consumption, but I have to admit after spending this last month paying attention to it, my opinion has changed quite a bit.
This might be a long post, if you want a more audiovisual explanation, I have uploaded a new video going over mostly the same talking points.
The Experiment
Starting in August, every day I would record the starting point of the book I am reading, and then measure the amount of time I read throughout the day with a stopwatch. At midnight, I'd record the ending point, and then calculate the difference to know how many characters I read for that day in total, then divide it by the time spent reading, to find out my average char/hr reading speed for that day.
I put all the numbers into a spreadsheet in case you want to take a look.
The results
I was skeptical at first, but I was very surprised to find out that my reading speed went from ~7800ch/hr to up to over 15,000ch/hr in just a few weeks. And all of this happened while I wasn't specifically trying to skimread or speedread or anything like that. I was just more aware of reading and paying attention to the book rather than getting distracted because I didn't want to get "fake" data.
As someone who didn't believe in the reading speed "meme", I have to say this was a very surprising outcome. I went from needing 2 hours every day to reach my 15,000 ch/day goal, to just 1 hour and then read way past my goal with all the extra time gained. While at first 15,000 characters felt like a moderate amount of reading (~2 hours), by the end of the month they felt way more like some leisure reading goal (~1 hour a day). And I say this as someone who's been reading a lot already.
Pros and Cons of focusing on reading speed
Throughout the month I noticed that raising your reading speed comes with both pros and cons, and while I now think it is important to be aware of how fast you read, it's not all positives and it's good to be careful especially as a beginner.
Pros:
-
You get to go through more content in less time. This is obvious, but needs to be said. We improve by being exposed to more language, and if you get exposed to more language faster, it follows that you'll be able to improve at the language much faster if you read at a higher pace. Also assuming your enjoyment isn't affected, you get to enjoy more stuff which is always good.
-
You can flex on others. This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke. I personally don't care about showing off my (poor) reading speed to others, but some people are oddly competitive and showing their progress recorded as an actual stat seems to be motivating to them. If you are that kind of person, it can be useful to you. Just make sure you are measuring the right data (more on this later)
-
More focus on reading, less distractions. I noticed that as I was caring more about not "missing" on my reading goals and making sure I was actually recording reliable numbers, I got distracted less and less by the world around me. I stopped checking discord in the middle of a reading session, taking breaks to browse reddit, getting interrupted by phone notifications, etc. This allowed me to focus more on what I was reading and actually "lock in" and cover more ground more quickly at a higher level of awareness.
Cons:
-
Potential drop in comprehension. Especially if you're a beginner and push yourself to read faster than what you are comfortable with, your comprehension will be affected. There is a fine balance to strike, and you should make sure you don't overdo it.
-
Obsessing over stats. As a counterpoint from the stat-focused type of person I mentioned earlier, if you end up just maximizing for stats and reading speed, you will miss the forest for the trees. You might read "bad" stuff, uninteresting stuff, too simple stuff that you don't like, etc. All just so you can say "I got through this at X reading speed" without caring for the contents. This is not good.
-
Less enjoyment. This is a follow-up from the previous point, but if you end up worrying too much about your reading speed and focus on just the numbers, your enjoyment for the content itself will go down. The less enjoyment, the harder it is to acquire language too, which means your language acquisition might suffer too.
-
More mentally tiring. If you try to read at max focus and as quickly as you can all the time, you will tire much faster. For example, if you can only do 20 minutes at 20,000 ch/hr before feeling tired or getting a headache, you'll actually read less (and in a worse state) than if you read comfortably for 1 hour at 10,000 ch/hr.
Are we measuring the right stuff?
If you look at my progress graph, you'll see that I have a (scarily) consistent increase of reading speed almost every single day until I finished reading ある魔女が死ぬまで3, and then my reading speed plummeted again when I started reading レーエンデ国物語 which is a more "dense" book language-wise.
I think everyone knows that reading speed is affected by the difficulty of the material, and also that your speed goes up slowly as you read more stuff within the same domain/series/author as you get more comfortable with that writing style, but I don't think that paints the whole picture or explains my early bumps in reading. I started this challenge from the fourth book of the 火狩りの王 series, and even after I moved to ある魔女が死ぬまで (a much easier light novel in style) my speed kept going up and it was my third book in the series. Clearly it's not just that I was getting used to it. I was already used to it. Something else must have changed in my reading focus.
This highlights some inconsistencies in how we measure reading speed and why we shouldn't rely just on it as a measure of one's ability in the language (something I've often seen people do). On top of that, I think sometimes we don't realize how misleading the numbers can be.
Take for example the words 私 and わたし. They are the exact same word, except one is in kanji and the other is in kana. Any beginner can read these words, and the time it takes you to read 私 or わたし is virtually the same. Except if we just count only the characters, then わたし will seem to make us "faster" at reading, because we're reading 3 characters in the same time it would have taken us to read just one kanji (私). Does it mean we are reading at 3x the speed? No, obviously not.
In English, when all words are spelled out in a single script, we can kinda use character reading speed as a metric of overall reading speed, but in Japanese I am not convinced that is reliable enough. We group words together from context and shapes, and if we go through something that spells a lot of simple words in kana, as long as we don't confused by a huge kana soup, it will look like we're reading faster compared to the same book written all in kanji (this is on top of the fact that some kanji might be harder to read to an inexperienced reader).
At the same time, we often consider longer books to be more difficult, as I've heard people often mention light novels are different from "real books" because they are shorter and so easier to read. However in my experience I've seen a lot of very dense (kanji-wise) books that seem shorter than much longer light novels, but that's because those books tend to write all their words in kanji and so are more compact. If you spelled everything out in kana, you'd have much more to ground to cover.
Another factor that influenced my reading speed seems to be the fact that I tend to pause between sentences to just enjoy what I was reading, either grammatically or semantically, and just experience it emotionally rather than just "getting through it". Maybe I am weird, but I tend to notice interesting particle usages, grammar structures, or just interesting collocations that I tend to often highlight and store in my notes to review later. It is not that I am actually reading a sentence slower, I still take the same amount of time to read it, but it's just that I tend to get distracted and take micro-breaks (literally 1-2 secs) between each sentence and that "time loss" compounds a lot when you are measuring your reading speed.
And lastly, another factor that affects the perceived reading speed, is how many lookups we do even for words we already know. I sometimes will read a sentence, and then go back and double check things like the pitch accent of a word, or make sure I actually mentally mapped the right reading of a kanji compound and that I wasn't misreading it, etc. It's not that my actual reading speed for that sentence is lower, it's just that I spend a bit more time on it after I have already read it. Still, it will show up as reading slower compared to someone that doesn't do that.
These are all factors you can try to minimize and that is I think what happened in my huge bump in reading speed during the challenge. I simply stopped doing a lot of these side activities and just focused on purely just reading and the numbers kept growing.
Tips to make your reading faster
As a conclusion, let me list some advice that I found useful to improve my reading speed. It might not apply to everything, but it can be good to try if you care about getting your speed up.
-
Be more aware of what you read but don’t stop too much. As I mentioned, stay focused on reading but don't stop to break down every single grammar point or word. Just move on. As long as you get the meaning of the sentence, that is enough.
-
Move to the next sentence faster. Similarly, don't do like I did and get stuck thinking about one sentence too long. It's nice to savour some sentences here and there, but if you do it for every sentence your measured reading speed will be affected.
-
Train yourself to not subvocalize everything. This is the curse of subvocalizers like myself. We tend to imagine actual sounds in our mind as we go through written material. Especially in dialogues I notice I am slower at reading than descriptions, because in my mind I am actually playing out a scene like in a movie or anime. I hear the characters speak, and that is slower than just reading. I don't have good advice on how to do this, but if you can train yourself to not subvocalize, your actual (not just measured) reading speed will go up.
-
Skip words you cannot read out loud. Japanese has a lot of words and made-up compounds that simply don't have a valid or official reading. Some words you literally cannot read out loud because they don't exist. I've seen learners often get stuck on these words going "how do I read X?" when in reality it doesn't matter. On top of that, there are also a lot of words you might recognize and know what they mean (cause of kanji or context) but not remember how to read them. It is okay to skip those words. Don't get stuck on them, trying to recall their reading. Move on. This can backfire if you're a beginner and if you do it a lot as you might over-rely on the meaning of kanji and never learn the actual (spoken) words, so don't do it too much, but it's definitely a skill you need to train. Not all words can be read and you should make peace with that fact.
-
You can skip uninteresting sentences. This is gonna be controversial but I'll say it. Sometimes I just skip entire sentences if I know that they aren't very important or if I want to jump ahead to a more interesting scene. This is easier to do with material you are familiar and comfortable with, but I don't need to read all meticulous descriptions of the landscape or whatever, sometimes it's okay to just… skip those sentences. I wouldn't do it for important things like conversations or some fight scenes, but if the author wants to spend half a paragraph describing the smoothening of skirts (I'm looking at you Robert Jordan) then I'll probably skip ahead because I just don't care. Again, don't do this too much, but still…
-
It’s okay to not finish sentences you already understand. Humans are really good predictive machines. It's common for us to already know what someone will be saying, before they even finish their sentence. Especially if you're comfortable with the language and context, sometimes you don't need to hear the whole sentence to know what someone is saying. Just like in the Frozen song: "We always finish each other's…." Sentences? No, Sandwiches! But most people already know intuitively what the end of the sentence is supposed to be. You can do the same in Japanese too. Sometimes I find myself skipping to the next sentence as I am halfway through the previous one, because I already know where the author is going. This is also very common with set phrases and collocations where some word at the beginning will hint at how the sentence ends. If I see a まるで I know the sentence will almost always finish with some のように structure. If I see さっぱり I know the sentence will end with わからない, this is so common that people often just say さっぱり alone without the verb, because it is almost always followed by わからない anyway. Just as an example.
Conclusion
Reading speed is not the be-all-end-all of language learning, but it has a lot of benefits that I think are good to consider for an intermediate/advanced learner who'd want to bring their reading to the next level. At the same time, there are a lot of pitfalls and tricky things that might make the reading speed stat unreliable, especially if used as a comparison with other people. So, while raising your reading speed is worth it, don't worry too much about it as an actual stat or number. Try to apply some of the tips I mentioned above to your own reading habits and see how it goes. I can almost guarantee you that it will be useful, even just because you'll be able to cover more ground and read more stuff in less time.
Thanks for reading!
by morgawr_