HN Books @HNBooksMonth

My base reading speed for most English-language books and other publications is about 500 words per minute, with good comprehension by test. I have never had any trouble at all finishing all the sections of a standardized test with time to spare, for example, whether the SAT or the GRE or the LSAT. There is a huge published literature on reading skills improvement, for readers of all levels of reading proficiency, and when I was in university I read many books about that topic, including some books that made incredible "speed-reading" claims, to see what I could do to improve my ability to finish my homework while working my way through my university courses. One distillation I have of all the advice I read is that it helps reading speed and comprehension a lot to improve vocabulary. English vocabulary improvement can build on studying common Greek, Latin, and French word roots that show up over and over in English words. Doing that seems to have done the most for my reading speed and comprehension, which was never bad in English. A book I recommend for vocabulary development is English Vocabulary Elements 2nd edition.[1] To bolster my reading speed in other languages, I've also had to focus on reading practice and acquiring reading vocabulary. In Chinese for foreign learners, the materials by the late John DeFrancis, his Chinese Reader series in beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, are still the best available for that purpose, although they appear to be going out of print.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

This line from the article was interesting: "And he does not think much of Benedict's tweets in Latin - 'the last one was a real case of messing up Latin word order'." That's especially bad, because Latin tends to have freer word order than (for example) English in the first place.

In my university days, I had a girlfriend who was studying German and Latin (to become a secondary school teacher in those two subjects). My wife I won over with the much more practical modern language Chinese. Incidental study of Latin is useful to native speakers of Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and the like) to understand the origin of their native language, and somewhat less useful to speakers of most languages spoken in Europe, whether Indo-European languages or not, to understand the sources of much of their vocabulary. (Concentrated study of the sources of vocabularly of modern languages through study of word roots

http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

is very helpful, but that doesn't require learning Latin as a language as such.)

As long as there are great landmarks in Western writing like Newton's Principia available in original Latin editions, there will always be a reward for learning Latin. But with many languages to learn to speak to many people, Latin will not be in first place as the language to learn next for interesting live conversation.

⬐ cafard

Latin should be a fine language for Twitter, as wedging a lot into not many words. A lot of Spinoza's paragraphs in the Ethics would certainly fit in 140 characters.

⬐ GuiA

If that's a criteria for language selection, might as well all go with Chinese :)

⬐ cafard

Well, sure, but maybe not at the Vatican.

⬐ gamegoblin

IIRC Vietnamese has the highest syllabic information density of any natural language. Chinese being a close second (about 94% that of Vietnamese).

Edit: found that article http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.ht...

⬐ FreakLegion

It's very difficult to 'mess up' Latin word order. Just because something doesn't read like Caesar or Cicero doesn't mean it's wrong. Latin allows for a lot of rhetorical flair -- Horace's word order, for example, can be incredibly jumbled, but it's perfectly correct. The tweets are probably fine, just like Milton's English is fine.

Previous HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419795

What I said then was that I read a lot of speed-reading books when I was in college. I was working my way through, living in my own rented place, so time was of the essence. But I eventually decided that a lot of speed-reading techniques are less useful than they appear. The most helpful book I discovered during that research phase was Reading for Power and Flexibility

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-Johns...

which was a refreshing change of emphasis from most other speed-reading books.

Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading (for example, making sure to read the whole table of contents, the whole preface/introduction/foreword, and even the whole index before starting the book proper); focused vocabulary development targeting words with Latin and Greek roots used in the international scientific vocabulary; and daring not to read a whole book if reading one section of it would answer my question.

Good vocabulary development books are English Vocabulary Elements

http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

and English Words from Latin and Greek Elements

http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...

Both of those books will help you to read faster by helping you recognize word meanings from word roots.

⬐ justlearning

"Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading..."

Thank you. These are the kind of notes I am looking for.

I read a lot of speed-reading books when I was in college. I was working my way through, living in my own rented place, so time was of the essence. But I eventually decided that a lot of speed-reading techniques are less useful than they appear. The most helpful book I discovered during that research phase was Reading for Power and Flexibility

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Power-Flexibility-Sparks-Johns...

which was a refreshing change of emphasis from most other speed-reading books.

Good techniques I learned from various sources were pre-reading (for example, making sure to read the whole table of contents, the whole preface/introduction/foreword, and even the whole index before starting the book proper); focused vocabulary development targeting words with Latin and Greek roots used in the international scientific vocabulary; and daring not to read a whole book if reading one section of it would answer my question.

Good vocabulary development books are

http://www.amazon.com/English-Vocabulary-Elements-Keith-Denn...

and

http://www.amazon.com/English-Words-Latin-Greek-Elements/dp/...