Speed Reading ? Beginning ? Tjen Wellens

I first read about speed reading about half a year ago. In June before the summer holidays (and for me before the retaking of my exams). Thanks to my mother I stumbled into a book by Mark Tigchelaar.?called ?Haal meer uit uw hersenen? . In this book was an introduction to memory techniques, speed reading and mind mapping. I had heard about memory techniques and mind mapping before and was subjectively against mind mapping because I thought it laborious and ugly. But the speed reading was a real eye opener.

Speed reading basics

If you haven?t heard about speed reading yet, but here is a short introduction: the average adult reads at the speed of 200 wpm(words per minute). Speed reading exists of some simple techniques (and some less simple). Those techniques allow you to increase your reading speed.

The average speed of 200 wpm and the world record I think currently is over 4000 wpm. Which is quite crazy if you ask me. Speed reading makes you understand texts better and faster. if you can go from 200 wpm to 400 wpm, you doubled your speed, meaning you?ll need to read half as long?

And more importantly, increasing your speed is easy, really easy! Just a few techniques like using a pointer or varying your speed and not only will you read a lot faster and also understand better what you read.

Advanced techniques

I won?t go in depth into speed reading here because there are way better guides to it on the internet or in books. I recently bought Tony Buzan ?s ?The Speed Reading Book? and finished it just this morning. The basics I knew already but the advanced techniques seemed godlike?

He talks about reading 2 lines at once, reading forward and backward various combinations and a lot of fine tuning. These 2 really caught my eye! I mean, reading backwards? 2 lines at once, thats like huh?? He explains these things so you understand it possible (but still quite difficult to reach).

Now these things seem to fail with me, probably because they take previous basic training before you can successfully read with these advanced techniques. And as I read the book without taking practice time between chapters or parts it?s quite obvious I can?t suddenly read backward.?For example, you might need to be able to read more words at once if you want to read backwards like explained in that book. Probably the same for multiple lines.

Dyslexia?

By the way I am for the first time experiencing something that might be my dyslexia. I was tested about 2 years ago.

In the book are training exercises for expanding your width of see-field (I forgot the jargon they have for it) These exercise exists of 3 numbers next to each other like 737
You cover the number then uncover it and quickly cover it again and write down what you can remember. The amount of numbers increases after a while.

I noticed that I tend to switch numbers around quite often, especially when they get longer. Now this might be normal to everyone, caused by dyslexia, or maybe because my main language is Dutch.

Let me explain about Dutch. The numbers between 10 and 100 are read ?reversed?.

 nr English   Dutch
  2  two       twee
  7  seven     zeven
  10 ten       tien
  50 fifty     vijftig

So you can see the likeness. But here comes the irregular part:

52 fifty-two twee?nvijftig
 25 twenty-five vijfentwintig

This is a thing I dislike about the Dutch language, it?s irregularity with numbers under 100. Well actually about every number as each number is split per 1000, so it cycles. I just now realize it?s the same with numbers 10-20 in English?

So anyway dyslexia, Dutch or normal I haven?t figured it out yet.

Future

Even so with these bumps on the road I am planning to start training myself in speed reading, because it?s just too useful.
(and I ll keep training in English at the same time, and because English is quite an awesome language)

Source: http://www.tjenwellens.eu/other/speed-reading-intro/

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