关于阅读速度

On Reading Speed

> By Li Xiaolai · 2008-01-01 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113100012/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/250.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

A student wrote to ask me how to improve reading speed—he said it was because he felt I read books very fast. He asked whether I had ever specially practiced some "speed-reading technique."

For various reasons, I have never specially practiced any "speed-reading technique." Although I know that some "speed-reading courses" abroad do have some theoretical basis, I always feel that this kind of thing, like so-called "success studies," is far from unassailable, so in the end I never took any "speed-reading technique" too seriously. As for the "speed-reading techniques" fairly popular online, there's a book [here](http://www.scribd.com/doc/96082/-Self-Help-Stephen-Covey-The-Speed-Reading-Course).

I know just one thing for certain—as I read more and more books, my reading speed got faster and faster. So I'm rather inclined to believe this plain summary: so-called reading speed is actually nothing more than one manifestation of accumulated reading volume. In the 6 years I lectured at New Oriental, I mentioned this feeling in almost every class, yet it seems not many students understood what I was talking about.

Dr. Blachowicz's survey results gave me a basis for explaining this principle more clearly:

> [Translator's note: quoted by the author from Dr. Blachowicz's findings (in Chinese); not Li Xiaolai's own words.] A fifth-grade student who manages to do 10 minutes of independent reading every day will read 622,000 more words a year than children who do no independent reading……

Dr. Blachowicz's data tell us that a fifth-grade child reads roughly 170 English words a minute. In fact, when Chinese students read Chinese, they can manage roughly more than 200 characters a minute (because Chinese characters are all monosyllabic, whereas English words often have more than one syllable).

If we calculate at a reading speed of 200 characters/minute, not counting primary school, in just the three years of junior high school each child on average reads about 15,000 characters a day (equivalent to only 75 minutes of reading). In other words, in junior high school an ordinary student's total reading over three years will exceed 16 million characters—if we assume an average book has 200,000 characters, that's equivalent to 80 books.

As reading volume accumulates, a) reading speed will rise, b) comprehension will strengthen; and the latter will in turn raise the former. A child who does a lot of extracurricular reading in junior high school may read no less than 30 million characters over the three years of junior high—especially in this age when the internet is so developed.

By senior high school, the growth in the reading volume of children who love to read goes beyond what ordinary people can imagine—their reading speed naturally rises 2–3 times, and because their comprehension has risen greatly, they often don't need "speed reading"; instead they get more information through "skimming." For example, if an author provides three examples to prove a point—appearing as three paragraphs—then a person with comprehension will skim the first example, skip the other two, and go on to read the next section. Because at such times their reading speed looks much faster than other people's. [Translator's note: the original writes 阅读速读 ("reading speed-read"), a slip for 阅读速度, "reading speed"; translated by the intended sense] So, usually, students who accumulated a large reading volume in junior high will see their reading speed rise by roughly 10 times or so in senior high. Calculated this way, over the whole three years of senior high, children who love reading will usually, by a conservative estimate, accumulate a reading volume of more than 100 million characters in this period.

For such students, by the time they graduate from senior high school, it would be strange if they couldn't read Chinese "ten lines at a glance." So, generally speaking, a university student can leaf through an entire magazine like *Reader* (《读者》) in about 30 minutes, whereas a person with a junior-high education might not finish the same magazine in several days.

When many students ask me how to improve reading speed, they usually mean "English reading speed." The answer is nothing else—just accumulate reading volume. Spend an hour a day reading English articles (they can be books, magazines, or newspapers—for example [the online edition of the New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/)). By a conservative estimate you can read 3000 words an hour (since it's English, you can go a bit slower, and add the time for looking things up in the dictionary); then over a year, that's an accumulated reading volume of more than 1 million words, and after two years your reading speed will approach native level (because you already have an adult's comprehension now).

The key is: do you have that kind of patience? Two years—more than seven hundred days, every day the same?

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