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How many words do you read per day? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4150 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 17 of 24 23 January 2015 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I made a word count on almost everything I've read in English, in the 24h period between
yesterday 12PM and today 12PM.: 4249 words. But the fora I usually read were a bit more quiet than usual, so perhaps on a better day the number could raise. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4967 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 18 of 24 23 January 2015 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Counting pages:
French - 30 Norwegian - 10 German - 10 Chinese - 5 Georgian - 4 Russian - 3 These numbers may vary, but these have been the usual ones lately. It is extremely tiresome to read the weaker languages beyond those numbers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6504 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 24 25 January 2015 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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My first thought was that the question would be impossible to answer because I don't count pages and even less words. A standard novel would contain from around 70-80.000 words to maybe 200.000 for a really thick time spender. The problem is that most of my reading nowadays isn't whole books from A to Z, but articles from the internet, magazines and other fragmented sources, but based on the time I spend and coupling that information with information about the time I spend on books of a given size in situations where I know the time frame, I would say that I probably read the equivalent of a very small novel daily as extensive reading. Though in most cases it wouldn't be a novel or even a book, but more likely a motley assembly of shorter texts in maybe half a dozen languages.
Right before I became language crazed in 2006 (for the second time) I would probably have read more, but if we go even further back I had other time consuming hobbies like painting and composing music which took some of my free time, so all in all: my guess is that I read an average about 50.000 words daily (including stuff in Danish and English). The sustained reading sessions I mentioned above include reading "Introduccion a la España medieval" (227 pages in Spanish) during my recent flight back home from Málaga to Billund in Denmark - around 3 hours. Reading one of the first Harry Potter books in the train from Århus til Sorø - around 2½ hours. The fat "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (796 pages) once took most of my flight time back across the Atlantic Ocean from the USA - but that included time for for eating and doing nothing. And now we are at that series: I bought "H.P. e o prisoneiro de Azkaban" in Funchal on Madeira (345 pages), and as far as I remember I read it in one evening. By inference, if I spent an evening reading assorted stuff on the internet or in magazines it would probably amount to one fat book, and given that I spend more time on intensive studies than on reading for fun the sober estimate would be a small book daily. Edited by Iversen on 26 January 2015 at 3:33pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4931 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 20 of 24 25 January 2015 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't count words either. It varies so much between the languages I speak and study.
It may take me a half an hour to read/figure out two sentences in Ojibwe, where I could plow through 20 pages of Spanish or Italian. And, what exactly is a word? This has been brought up several times here on HTLAL, but a single word in an agglutinating language may equal a full sentence in a non-agglutinating one. I count amount of time spent reading. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6504 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 24 26 January 2015 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is an interesting list of novel lengths at commonplacebook.com, but unfortunately only for books in English. However it should in principle be possible to import a book in several translations into MS Word or LibreOffice or whatever and let the software count the number of words and letters in each language, and then we might get a fairly reliable indication of quantitative differences between languages - especially if the translations go in different directions, not always from English into something else.
But frankly, even if one language is slightly more longwinded (or whatever you might call it) than another, that doesn't prove that it takes longer to read it. Maybe a book in Russian or German has more characters and fewer words than its translation into English, but probably not so much that it really affects the time it takes for a native trained reader to get through it. Individual differences in reading speed will be much more important. Edited by Iversen on 26 January 2015 at 4:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4334 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 22 of 24 26 January 2015 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Readlang gives you a word count for books imported into the system in EPUB format. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chillr Newbie Australia Joined 3835 days ago 5 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French | Message 23 of 24 26 January 2015 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm on day 3 of a project to read one tanka (a 31 syllable Japanese poem) every day out of a book of 101
Tanka. I guess you could describe it as a 'mini-habit' project. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3343 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 24 of 24 17 March 2015 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I read French I always listen to a recorded audio version simultaneously, so I tend to count time values only. Currently I listen for at least 30 minutes each day. While listening I read along with the English-translation version of the material (first pass) and then later do the same while reading along with the original French version (second pass).
After counting a few samples this 30 minute time slot seems to be equivalent to about 4600-5000 words per 30-minute slot. If I were studying seriously, I would increase the time to about 3 hours per day, which would mean about 28-30k words read. But I'm still in the beginner/intermediate stage of my learning. After I get more comfortable with listening, I could switch off the recordings and just sight read material without listening. For an experienced person with the language this should definitely be much faster than listening, so in the long run I could hope to achieve a rate of 60k words per day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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