We stop learning to read when we’re 10 years old – Learn speed reading now!

Trying to Ride a Tricycle in the Fast Lane

Most adults still read the same way they did when they were ten years old – with no sign of speeding up!

Do you remember what it was like the first time you tried to read? You learned the alphabet when you were about five or six and could pronounciate short words. “M … Mo … Mom” That’s probably hwo you started, letter by letter, until you’d gotten through the whole word. Then you’d start the whole arduous process over again with the next word, until you’d gotten through the whole sentence well enough that you could understand it.

At about ten years old, you were reading more fluidly. You read word by word, maybe moving your lips or whispering along to yourself as you went. Although you had made great improvements between the ages of five and ten, five years later, at fifteen, you were still in almost the same place – reading each word individually – although now your active vocabulary had increased to about eight hundred to a thousand words.

Using the right tools for speed reading

Now that you’re an adult, you have an active vocabulary of at least two thousand words and you can understand more challenging texts. But your reading techniques have probably not improved very much. You’re still reading the same way you did at 10: Going through each sentence, each paragraph, each page word by word.

It’s as though you’re trying to ride your tricycle on the highway: You could be going much faster, if you were only using the right tools!

As a Swede, I’m astounded by this because in Scandinavia no one reads word by word. We learn to read quite differently, so that even as elementary school students we look at whole phrases at once – effective speed reading. That’s our secret to reading so much faster!

You can learn to do it, too: Speed reading like the Swedish do. You’ll learn all about it in my new book.