Extensive reading and reading speed

[pinion 12]

Long time lurker, first time poster...thought this data might be of interest to some of you. The graph below shows my increasing reading speed over the course of about 15.6 million characters read between December 2018 and July 2020 (so just over a year and a half).

 

 

Some notes:

• Reading time includes time spent looking up unknown words in Pleco's document reader, creating Pleco flashcards, and googling unknown references, plus a little occasional texting. 
• Most of what I read was webnovels, with a few real books thrown in here and there. Other than starting out with a webnovel that I'd heard was easy, I didn't make much of an attempt to filter for difficulty.
• When I started, I'd learned around 1600 characters (recognition only), but I'm a heritage speaker, so my vocabulary was probably somewhat larger than that of a second-language learner who knows an equal number of characters. At this point I'd say I recognize 4000 characters or so.
• I read roughly the first 2.5 million characters either fully out loud or muttered under my breath, and switched to reading silently only when reading out loud began to noticeably slow me down. I still tend to semi-voluntarily mouth the words when reading something unfamiliar or difficult.

 

I hope this is helpful for someone, as my small attempt to give back after all the time I've spent reading the massive amount of accumulated wisdom on these forums.

[roddy 5,358]

Thanks! Do you feel like you're still speeding up, or have you reached a level you're happy with?

[i__forget 14]

How many hours per day did you spend doing this, and when you say heritage speaker do you mean that you could actually speak but not read?

[pinion 12]

@roddy: Well, the data stops in July 2020 because that's when I switched over to working on traditional characters, but I don't think I'd hit a plateau yet at that point. There's definitely been a significant drop in speed after switching to traditional, but I expect it'll catch up at some point--though maybe not as quickly as I'd like, given that I've recently shifted more of my time/attention to speaking. Ideally I'd like to read as fast as an adult educated in Chinese, but I don't know how achievable that will ultimately be. At any rate, the reason I started studying Chinese in the first place was to read things anyway, so I'm just going to continue to read, and I expect that as I do so my reading speed will continue to improve (albeit increasingly slowly).

 

@i__forget: My goal during this period was three hours a day, which I probably met more often than not (although things definitely fell off after the pandemic started). My speaking when I started was broken at best, but I already had good listening comprehension for everyday conversation, so I certainly wasn't starting from zero.

[Jan Finster 236]

On 10/11/2020 at 11:52 PM, pinion said:

about 15.6 million characters read between December 2018 and July 2020 (so just over a year and a half).

 

10 million characters a year is an insane amount for someone "learning" Chinese😲 👍

[大块头 416]

Congratulations on your progress! You appear to have reached a near-native reading speed. I've been collecting a similar dataset, and I hope to have a graph like yours someday.

1. Do the points in the plot represent your reading rate for random sections of text from the novels you were reading?
2. Would you mind sharing a spreadsheet or csv file of your measurements? When I have time I'd like to try fitting a couple models to these data.
3. Consider sharing this dataset with someone researching extensive reading. As I understand it, all studies in the literature only measure reading rate at two points in time (e.g. the start and end of a semester). The high time resolution of this dataset is unique.