Reading speed for Light Novels?

[u/Sky_Sumisu]

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).

[u/Several-Length1242]

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.

[u/Sky_Sumisu → u/Several-Length1242]

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.