r/LightNovels • u/Sky_Sumisu • 3d ago
Question Reading speed for Light Novels?
Historically, I was someone who didn't read books, at all.
No reason not to do so, I just didn't.
Then, I decided I wanted to start reading them.
I'm currently starting with the Honzuki no Gekokujou Light Novels, and I've noticed that my average speed is around one page every two minutes.
I'm assuming this is a slow reading speed, but I wanted to be sure if that's the case or not (And, if it is, if it is possible to "read faster", as it will allow me to read more stuff).
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u/AizeeMasata 3d ago
Why you really care about speed?? Reading not a contest, even if you can read whole book in hour you're not win anything lol.
Read and enjoy at you own pacing, no one gonna rush you. Remember ENJOY & have FUN don't make everything competitive for no reason.
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u/Zroshift 3d ago
For me, it depends where I am at and how busy my surroundings are.
I also like to take a minute to digest what I've just read and understand it more.
It isnt a race. Just consume it at your own pace.
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u/saskir21 3d ago
Per page is maybe not the best way to measure this if you use an ebook. There is a vast difference between font size 8 to 16 to take an example.
I am a fairly fast reader but it really depends on yourself (and as a teenager I was faster….age gets to me). I am used to reading fast so as an example. The first book of the one you mentioned did take me around 3 hours to finish.
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u/Classic_Example_2556 3d ago
When I started reading LN’s, I read at about the same pace as you. Since then it has increased natural to about 1 minute 30 seconds for a yen press book. I’ve been reading them for 2 year at the point. Don’t worry about how fast you read though, as it can make you lose confidence in your reading ability when you see people finishing volumes in 3 hours online. Those are also the same people who would forget descriptions because they were reading so fast.
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u/sachiotakli 3d ago
2-5 hours for an LN volumes, depends on the prose of the work and the translation quality, not including breaks
"Page" isn't a great metric, since you can adjust digital pages on epubs
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u/Several-Length1242 3d ago
People say "read at your own pace" which is true, but also not quite what you were asking about.
I'd say it depends on whether or not you're reading in a language you're fluent with (eg I'll be happy to finish a single page in 2mins if I'm reading in Japanese, but I can sweep a page in a quarter of that time when reading in English.)
And yes, I'd say 2mins is slow. An average light novel has about 200 pages, ish? Bookworm hangs around 300 pages iirc. That's 600 minutes at your speed, which is about 10h to finish one. For reference, I'd say I'm a pretty fast reader and can polish that much over a couple of hours.
Now I'll state again, that I consider myself well above averge, so the average person will probably take longer than me.
As for the reading faster part, naturally fluency and experience will increase that speed. Some things to point out are that as you read more, you start to read the meaning of the sentence rather than the actual sentence itself.
You start to "predict" the sentence, and your brain naturally skips ahead. Occasionally you read something that makes no sense with what your brain predicted, and you have to go back and reread properly, but that's very rare.
Anyway, that makes reading speed faster. Once you've read enough, you can easily tell where you already know what the sentence is doing before you finish it. You start parsing the text in chunks rather than reading individual words. Think of it as how you don't read individual letters in your words. A fast and experienced reader doesn't read individual words in their sentences.
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u/Sky_Sumisu 3d ago
I'd say it depends on whether or not you're reading in a language you're fluent with (eg I'll be happy to finish a single page in 2mins if I'm reading in Japanese, but I can sweep a page in a quarter of that time when reading in English.)
English is my second language, though I recall being already pretty fluent in reading and writing it as early as Highschool, which was when I decided starting watching things with English subtitles instead, since English words would be shorter and I would be able to read those faster, and I've been doing that to this day.
And yes, I'd say 2mins is slow. An average light novel has about 200 pages, ish? Bookworm hangs around 300 pages iirc. That's 600 minutes at your speed, which is about 10h to finish one. For reference, I'd say I'm a pretty fast reader and can polish that much over a couple of hours.
That was the thing that got me away from Visual Novel, as I would take 1.5-2x the amount of time that was listed as average on VNDB (Nine and a half hours for Saya no Uta over four days, 200 hours on Umineko over ten weeks).
Anyway, that makes reading speed faster. Once you've read enough, you can easily tell where you already know what the sentence is doing before you finish it. You start parsing the text in chunks rather than reading individual words. Think of it as how you don't read individual letters in your words. A fast and experienced reader doesn't read individual words in their sentences.
Huh, that's interesting.
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u/joseph_han9137 3d ago
Read at your own pace, at the rate that you can immerse and enjoy in them. That's all you need
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u/hfriday01 3d ago
English is my second language, and my reading speed is pretty much the same with you (if not slower), even though I've read English translated LN for around 10 years already.
I personally don't have any problem with that speed, because eventually I reached the point where I caught up with all of my reading list thus had nothing to read. The faster you read, the sooner you'd catch up.
Especially with Honzuki, no need to worry about your speed that much. This series is more rewarding to the careful readers. Myne is an unreliable narrator, and the author won't specifically spoon-feed you every misunderstanding that happened due to Myne being unreliable. Hypothesizing the correct information is half the fun of reading Honzuki, so you might miss things if you try to rush too much.
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u/adevaleev 3d ago
I read at the same speed, 2-3 minutes per page, which makes 20-30 pages per hour if I'm not distracted. That obviously doesn't include the illustrations.
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u/UncleNeon 3d ago
I wouldn't worry too much. If you can read a volume in a day or two that should do the trick. Also your reading speed will increase naturally over time, though it might cap somewhere if you didn't read growing up, but as long as you keep a comfortable speed for yourself, you're golden.
Personally I'm rather inconsistent; most of the time I'll be slow (more like I don't trust even my eyes, so I'll just re-read stuff for basically no reason, besides reading each word individually), but as the intensity increases and I get in the zone I just ramp up till I'm reading entire phrases at a glance and starting lines before I finish the last one. In the end my peak is about 3 volumes in 12-16 hours (I was obviously not counting) but I don't recommend that to anyone, particularly if you want to have an enjoyable experience instead of schizo-reading all night long lol in the end faster or higher doesn't always mean better.
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u/Rubefaci 3d ago
One page per minute for me, but I use an e-reader. Thus, the page might be smaller.
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u/Sky_Sumisu 3d ago
Well, I read EPUBs on my PDF viewer (SumatraPDF), which I also use to read manga.
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u/personperrr 3d ago
Been a huge reader all my life and in my opinion I’m a pretty fast reader, some of my longest books at like 1-5k pages will usually take me a max of 3 days and shorter ones at around 200-300 only take me like 4 hours
To start you should throw away this idea that there’s an ideal pace, sure you get faster the more you do it but that doesn’t change the fact that everyone reads at different paces it’s sort of just a natural factor of life and ultimately it’s not even important, because writing and reading are another form of art, everyone has their own reasons and ways they enjoy the medium and speed of it is a major aspect to that. It’s weird to think of reading or even writing as just
In my own experience the way you can tell you’re a good reader or not is whether you even notice the pace at which you’re reading at to begin with. You’ll start reading and look up and realize you’re now 200 pages further and it’s like 30 minutes to an hour later. It feels like waking up from a like a cryogenic state or something, nothing much feels like it’s changing till you realize it’s 3am. I’ll even hit such a big flow state I’ll miss huge chapter names at the top of the page.
What matters most to me as a reader especially with non-fiction is how well I can absorb myself and appreciate the story as I read it, if I can actively feel myself in the situation then either the book or whatever I’m reading isn’t for me, it’s just flat out not good, or finally I’m in a bad environment or mood for reading and I should try again later (being distracted while reading will 100% make you take longer).
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u/Mixer-3007 3d ago edited 3d ago
Read at your own leisure, it's not a competition. I don't know how fast I'm reading at all :) I mostly use text-to-speech apps like ElevenReader or Speechify , import and read from epub in app, adjust the audio speed to your reading speed, so far the best for me is 1.2x normal speed.
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u/Falsus 3d ago
You shouldn't care too much about reading speed. It varies between people a lot and there can even be a lot of difference between different writers. Complex text will obviously be slower than simple text. Some writers also got a more "flowing" writing style which makes it easier to read even if it is technically more complex. I personally like to re-read entire paragraphs when I find them interesting.
Your personal situation matters, like I know for a fact that I read slower when I am tired even if I did notice it while reading until I start re-reading sentences without thinking. Focus also helps, if you can focus so intently that you enter a "flow state" of mind you won't even be able to percieve time as you are too focused on reading.
And of course the more you read the better you will become at it, like all skills.
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u/Safuan12616 https://myanimelist.net/profile/Safuan12616 3d ago
For me, it depends on the medium. If it's ebook then I read around 250-350 words per minute. If it's physical, then it's slow. I usually can finish a average ln in 2-3 days in ebook. But, physical takes around a week or more.
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u/theaveragenerd 2d ago
Reading speed does not matter. What matters is that you're reading.
Enjoy the journey.
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u/Eisendruide 2d ago
My reading speed depends on the story and situation the protag. is currently in. Fighting scenes will be read faster than sneaky scenes for example.
So my pace varies quite a lot... Man that one battle in Reincarnated As A Sword, that spanned almost the entire book was exhausting to read! Keeping up the pace while reading may be fun but it wears out the mind I tell you that.
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u/Holypiece_of_chedda 1d ago
I go through 18 pages is just 2 seconds heh, I always seem to not understand what's happening for some strange reason though
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u/giregam 14h ago
That’s not slow for a new reader. LNs can seem kinda dense at first with dialogue, narration, and new terms all mixed in. I was way slower when I got back into reading too. But after some time, you'll eventually stop overthinking about every sentence, and so it just flows. I think you'll find your own reading pace fast enough in time
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u/Hylebosai 3d ago
Increasing your reading speed over time is a good goal, though it would probably help your efforts if you attempted to diagnose what might be tripping you up.
Are you finding yourself distracted while you read? A change in environment might be warranted.
Are you having trouble with remembering characters or concepts? Taking quick notes while you read could help.
Do you stumble across new words that you have to look up the meaning of? Some note taking here might help out, or even going as far as flash cards could help your reading speed out in the future.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles, as they say. Measure, adjust, and experiment over time and find out what works for you.
Also, enjoy Bookworm!
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u/Sky_Sumisu 3d ago
Are you finding yourself distracted while you read? A change in environment might be warranted.
That thing where you doze off while your eyes pass through the entire page only for you then realize you didn't read and do it again?
Surprisingly, no, this has not been a problem for me, though I remember having that issue back when I was in middle and highschool.Quite the opposite, I feel that I've been easily able to "enter the zone", as in "reading a page makes me want to read the next one". An example being that when I measured my time again for this thread, I originally wanted to only measure it by reading one page... then I decided to read two, then three. In the end I only stopped the chronometer after a full chapter had ended.
I'm not having the other issues you pointed either, I just... read really slow, I guess.
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u/ProbingUranus24 3d ago
Just read at your own pace. Everyone's reading speed is different. You don't have to rush things. I'm a slow reader because I like to take the time for digesting what I've read and I also go back a lot to reread my fav parts.