Spritzing - Speed reading

[Bjord]

http://spritzinc.com/

Ever heard of it?

You can allegedly learn and get used to 1000 wpm, like fucking Neo, and of course retain all the information.

Try it, it's quite fun. I could do 500 wpm right off the bat without any issues, 600 wpm is where I started having troubles.

If you have any study material in .pdf form you can even use Spritz reading with an App called RushReader, costs like $1 on AppStore/Google Play.

[Golem]

I love You!

[Teeth]

I worked with some speed reading training software for a few weeks, but I was kind of disappointed. Ultimately I felt that reading more quickly would not benefit either of the two main types of reading I do. I read a lot for the purpose of entertainment and for learning. Reading at fast wpm's reduces my enjoyment of a story and the degree of imagination I activate while reading. Reading when learning is usually limited by my cognitive speed and not my word recognition speed. I am a very fast reader, and with difficult texts I usually have to slow down anyway to allow my brain to do something with the text input. Aside from that I also noticed little improvement to my casual reading speed. Only when I really tried to peak I noticed that I had gotten somewhat faster.

Curious that this Spritz thing only uses one word at a time. The software I used focused on training several things and was designed to make you learn to read normal printed material faster. Things like suppressing tendencies to vocalize what you read, training your eye tracking speed and accuracy, enlarging the chucks you read before your eyes "saccade".

Also, why are you making threads like these in General Discussion?

[Bronto]

I worked with some speed reading training software for a few weeks, but I was kind of disappointed. Ultimately I felt that reading more quickly would not benefit either of the two main types of reading I do. I read a lot for the purpose of entertainment and for learning. Reading at fast wpm's reduces my enjoyment of a story and the degree of imagination I activate while reading. Reading when learning is usually limited by my cognitive speed and not my word recognition speed. I am a very fast reader, and with difficult texts I usually have to slow down anyway to allow my brain to do something with the text input. Aside from that I also noticed little improvement to my casual reading speed. Only when I really tried to peak I noticed that I had gotten somewhat faster.

Curious that this Spritz thing only uses one word at a time. The software I used focused on training several things and was designed to make you learn to read normal printed material faster. Things like suppressing tendencies to vocalize what you read, training your eye tracking speed and accuracy, enlarging the chucks you read before your eyes "saccade".

Also, why are you making threads like these in General Discussion?

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[Teeth]

I would have been cool if I actually achieved Neo speeds, but now I just wasted a bunch of hours doing retarded exercises for probably nothing. I am pretty skeptical now about the whole "tripling your reading speed", at least for any functional reading outside of speedtests.

[Rhekimos]

I briefly tried these as well. Interesting in itself, but the normal fixed sight points and reducing sub-vocalizations methods are enough for me.

Here's a free one that lets you use the same technique on any webpage and book you can open in your browser:
https://squirt.io/install.html

No logins necessary either.


And here's a bit of a letdown article for anyone wanting to be able to read all of physics in mere hours: http://lifehacker.com/the-truth-about-speed-reading-1542508398

[Latvian]

found out i am slightly faster at russian than english, never would have guessed that . 

[Rebelyell]

I would have been cool if I actually achieved Neo speeds, but now I just wasted a bunch of hours doing retarded exercises for probably nothing. I am pretty skeptical now about the whole "tripling your reading speed", at least for any functional reading outside of speedtests.

I went up from 80 words per minute to 400(can't really remember now) when I was like 12 with similar training
nowadays I have my startup speed  300 but I am sure that I can go way faster when I get sunk in to a good book, I managed to finish 2 Sormlight books in 2 weeks with all the RL stuffs like job ect.

But I actualy cant read on voice nowdays, It meakes it imposible for me because things that I try to say are like half sentence behind that I read atm. I think that it is similar to stuttering in RL.


edit: actually that web is really difrent to what I was doing, I had to foucus on whole sentences instead of words.

[Ikarus]

awkward name (Spritzen means "Squirting" in german) but nice idea

still, I prefer to enjoy my books and take my time

[Asheram]

Also, why are you making threads like these in General Discussion?

I think he is trying to make the moderators work.

[//saxon]

500 is doable, but then it starts getting a little silly at 600 and especially 700.

700 is ridiculous, when would you need to read that fast. Ordering food at record speed in a restaurant.

[Jona]

I found myself able to comprehend almost all of the text at 600 wpm, missing only a couple words. At 700 wpm I could comprehend what it was saying, but I found I couldn't really restate the sentences word-for-word... I got maybe 60% of it and just filled in the blanks. That said, who the fuck would ever want to read 1 word at a time at these "breakneck" speeds. It's such a strain on the eyes and really removes any and all enjoyment from reading. As Teeth said, if I wanted to read to learn something my brain wouldn't be able to keep up with what my eyes were seeing. If I was reading for fun I really wouldn't be in any sort of rush, it's more of a relaxing thing to do anyways. Overall, a pretty useless program/website unless for some reason you really only ever needed to skim things, which arguably means it might have been nice for getting through the required high school reading from back in the day.


P.S. Get rekt britmy old friends, the flag for the english language is the US flag.

[Rando]

awkward name (Spritzen means "Squirting" in german) but nice idea

still, I prefer to enjoy my books and take my time

Reading at 700 words per minute is probably a pretty good way to make women squirt.

[Xant]

Literally useless. 700 wpm was easy, but what's the point? When reading for entertainment I like to stop and appreciate the clever wordplay or beautiful exposition of something or what have you, and to re-read some things, and to stop and let my my imagination work.

When reading research it's similar, you want to control the speed of your reading and to give yourself time to fully understand what you just read, that's how you remember it in the future. Reading at a normal pace you can stop and think about the implications and different applications, so it both helps with memory and makes you think and understand it better, as opposed to speedreading where the concepts just flash through your mind and you can't stop to think about anything.

And I hate how they're selling it. "Read a 1000 page novel in 10 hours, what could you do with your spare time?!" as if entertainment is some sort of a competition. Hurr durr, what could you do if you fast-forwarded every movie you watched?

I still subvocalize at 700 WPM and I don't see why I'd want to get rid of that, helps make it coherent.

[Xant]

Curious that this Spritz thing only uses one word at a time. The software I used focused on training several things and was designed to make you learn to read normal printed material faster. Things like suppressing tendencies to vocalize what you read, training your eye tracking speed and accuracy, enlarging the chucks you read before your eyes "saccade".

From the FAQ:

Why Spritz is Different
There are lots of other reading techniques out there such as skimming (not reading every word), avoiding sub-vocalization (talking to yourself while reading) and enlarging the peripheral span (reading an entire page at a time by mental “snapshot”) that attempt to increase reading speeds. While these methods can be effective, achieving significant improvement requires intensive, continuous training and dedication. By contrast, spritzing can be learned in less than 5 minutes and, if you don’t spritz for a month, no practice is needed to return quickly to your previous speed or skill-level.In addition, none of these methods mentioned above help you unless you’ve got a lot of physical space for your content. From the fonts that we use to the algorithms that process content, Spritz is designed from the ground up to empower effective reading on a small display area. There is a lot more to Spritz than just reading fast!


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Actually one use I can see for it is in stuff like smart watches, having some information flash by at 700 WPM would be pretty useful. But that is a very niche market, especially since an iPhone serves the same purpose but better and without spritz 99.9% of the time.