grblpp grblpp grblpp: Audiobooks at 730 words per minute
Kristin: I have an app called Bookshare, do you know it?
Kathrin: No.
Kristin: She has a lot of books and I can listen to them all, which is very good for me. I listen to the books at 730 words per minute. But it’s a robotic voice that reads it. That’s good because it doesn’t sound strange when it’s so fast. So it’s no stranger than it already sounds.
Kristin opens the app and starts a book. I just hear “grblpp grblpp grblpp” and don’t understand a single word. Maybe, I tell myself, it’s because it’s English. But it’s more likely that I wouldn’t understand anything in German either. My listening skills are poor, even in my native language and even at a normal pace. I could also imagine that listening is just too slow for me, but I never pursued the question because I just don’t like listening. If there is a transcript for a podcast or video, I read the transcript, which is even faster than listening to a sped-up recording. At least I think so.
Kristin: I’ve been doing it this way for six years. In the beginning I listened to the books at about the normal pace, 230 words per minute or so. And then always a little faster. I can listen to almost all books in English at 730 words per minute.
Kathrin: Even the ones you read for fun? Or just those for university?
Kristin: Both. When you do this so often, it sounds completely normal. That’s more than twice as fast as most people’s reading speed.
I’ll tell you from memory what I know of Thomas Kapielski about his work in the film industry. I only know the text from a reading 25 years ago and it is therefore distorted in some places in my memory. So I’m telling you: videotapes with films on them, for sale when such a thing still existed. In reality, I read it again for this post, Kapielski checked rolls of film for money, not videotapes. That must have been around the mid-1970s. Kapielski had the same experience: the brain adapts to the new speed. You can read the more detailed version of the story in the Open Library (after registering, pp. 281-283), it’s worth it, it’s very funny.
Kristin: The problem since I started listening to the books faster and faster is my teachers. They are SO slow. I’m bored now because the teachers are so slow. I would then like to say: A little faster please!
Kathrin: How quickly is your YouTube set up?
Kristin: It’s different for every video because people talk at different speeds. But mostly: double speed. It annoys me a bit that it doesn’t go even faster because some people talk so slowly.
Kathrin: I have a Firefox add-on for YouTube that I think works. (That’s right: The add-on “Improve YouTube!” can achieve even faster playback speeds.) I prefer reading because I can’t easily skip it while watching videos when people first start with a lengthy “Hello, I’m so-and-so and I’m telling you you today this and that …”
Kristin: I’ll skip all of that. I have keyboard shortcuts for this, so I can jump forward ten seconds and find out if they say something more interesting. I can’t speak as quickly as I can listen, but when other people speak very quickly, for example because they are nervous, I can still understand everything very well. This also works with PDFs for university. I use Adobe Acrobat for text recognition and then I have an app, “Natural Reader”, so I can have PDFs and websites read to me. This can be done at five times the speed, but that is often too slow for me because it is five times the starting speed. It used to be up to three times as fast, then there was an update and now it’s five times. That’s what I do with everything I have to read for college, I listen to it while driving or at dinner. The only problem: I can’t skim anything like I can with reading texts. That’s not possible, but if I can listen to it three times as fast, it’s no slower than reading while skimming. I started this because I have reading and spelling difficulties. I find reading and writing in English very difficult and even more difficult in German because it is my second language. But the audio books work really well for me.
(Kristin C., in conversation with Kathrin Passig)