So, can somebody explain to me how lidstonMiku read 638 points (book pages) in one day yesterday? It seems like the balancing for game text is seriously out of whack.

Yeah, I have noticed that the leaderboard often has people who just play games. I don't even know what these games are like. Is it like a VN? I just read novels, on paper, so I really don't get it.
I figure it's a combination of some imbalance as you say and the ability (tendency?) of some gamers to sit for hours absorbed in a game. I know input is good, but I don't imagine these folks going out and using their language skills after sitting in front of whatever screen for a month straight. And is it a sense of competition or are they always gaming like this and just happen to tab their hours doing so during tadoku reading challenge?

I think I once read seven hundred pages in a single day once upon a time when I was in English. So yeah, scoring that high for reading in a foreign language like Japanese can only make me suspect that the scoring system needs a real adjustment.

People who read VN's are usually NEET's who do nothing but that all day.

Decided to sign up seeing that I'm reading stuff anyway.

I have a (dumb) question.
So officially the book I just finished reading has 191 pages.
The first five of those are contents, title pages, and stuff that's not really book. Do they count?
Every so often there are pictures that take up a full page - do I have to un-count those pages?
The last two pages I didn't bother reading because they're the afterword by the author and who cares, really? I'd assume those don't count.

But yeah - can I go by the official page count of the book or should I work out how many pages of actual reading there was?
Possibly no one even cares, which is fine too. I'm not sure how serious and competitive this all is.

[RawToast]

Aikynaro Wrote:So officially the book I just finished reading has 191 pages.
The first five of those are contents, title pages, and stuff that's not really book. Do they count?
Every so often there are pictures that take up a full page - do I have to un-count those pages?
The last two pages I didn't bother reading because they're the afterword by the author and who cares, really? I'd assume those don't count.

I'd just work out a system for counting the pages and stick with it. I personally wouldn't count the contents and title pages. When reading graded readers I would count the pages as I went along (giving some pages a 1/2 page value, etc.) -- that would be difficult to do post-reading with such a long book!

Some people take the challenge competitively, but your personal goal should to better your score from the last round.

I saw all those VN scores on the 1st and thought the users had counted their scores from the days before the challenge. I believe the top user's day 1 score accounts to over 12,000 'screens' of visual novels (638 pages with 0.05 weighting) . If they had been up for 16 hours, that would be 1 'screen' every 4/5 seconds -- for the entire day.

RawToast Wrote:I saw all those VN scores on the 1st and thought the users had counted their scores from the days before the challenge. I believe the top user's day 1 score accounts to over 12,000 'screens' of visual novels (638 pages with 0.05 weighting) . If they had been up for 16 hours, that would be 1 'screen' every 4/5 seconds -- for the entire day.

I'm pretty sure he didn't input that data all at once. I think I saw him input only a couple hundred pages at first, so I doubt he was using old data.

I think the maximum number of pages I ever read in a day in English was about 1000; this was with barely any breaks except for the bathroom and the occasional food (if you can call cold pizza 'food') or drink.
I agree that the value seems unrealistic in this competition, but I guess it's possible.

Forgot that this started, so I'm a couple days late. Oh well.

I'm slowly approaching the top 20 now! This stuff is actually pretty motivating, and for once, Tadoku isn't in the middle of a cluster of coursework or exams.

sholum Wrote:I think the maximum number of pages I ever read in a day in English was about 1000; this was with barely any breaks except for the bathroom and the occasional food (if you can call cold pizza 'food') or drink.
I agree that the value seems unrealistic in this competition, but I guess it's possible.

Forgot that this started, so I'm a couple days late. Oh well.

How do you manage that?! Do you have any tips on how to improve your reading speed? I can only read English and German at about 25-ish pages per hour. It's probably worth noting that I've got heavily reduced vision, but that's mitigated with Kindle anyway.

I wouldn't worry about the people at the very top, it's always going to seem off in a thing like this. Just compete with yourself and maybe other people you notice with close ranking/numbers.

Stian Wrote:How do you manage that?! Do you have any tips on how to improve your reading speed? I can only read English and German at about 25-ish pages per hour. It's probably worth noting that I've got heavily reduced vision, but that's mitigated with Kindle anyway.

What happens with me while reading fast in Japanese is that I don't fixate my eyes on the individual kana, only on kanji words or verbs at the end of sentences. The rest is kinda clear from peripheral vision, only when the meaning isn't obvious do I look closer.

I can read about 40-50 pages an hour that way, which would make 600 in a day possible if I tried.

Hmm. that sounds interesting actually, I might consider trying that, although it caused me to read some English word completely wrong for years before finding out what it actually is: "suspective", "invilgator", "compitable", etc. :p: (English isn't my native language).

I got used to scanning over text because of a lot of time spent on reddit. Not every comment is interesting, so I can kinda glance over a paragraph now and know if it's something I'm interested in. When I'm actually reading something I do the same, just on more of a sentence by sentence scale.

So if we want to sign up for 2.5, how do we sign up?

Stian Wrote:How do you manage that?! Do you have any tips on how to improve your reading speed? I can only read English and German at about 25-ish pages per hour. It's probably worth noting that I've got heavily reduced vision, but that's mitigated with Kindle anyway.

Like apirx said, you basically just glance at the words and, if you've got enough reading experience, you can get through it pretty quick. Also, I did mention I was reading all day, I meant all day, too; I was on a 28-30 hour schedule at the time (this was a number of years ago, when I had no responsibilities and didn't really care to do anything other than read).
I was reading every moment I could too, back then. I don't know if I could read that fast anymore, just due to the fact that I don't read as much as I used to.
My ultimate and final achievement for that kind of reading was finishing the entire Harry Potter series in just under six days, which is when I exceeded 1000 pages in a day (since the thousand pages were split between a paperback and hardback, it came out to more than 1000, but the font sizes were different).

I haven't gotten that good at reading Japanese yet, so I don't have any pointers, but what apirx said seems to be the technique to go for, since it's basically the equivalent of looking at the shape and first and last letter of an English word and guessing off of that.

Edit: As for reading things incorrectly due to speed reading, I did that too. In the event I picked up a new word while reading fast, I often learned it wrong and only realized when I was reading slowly (usually half-asleep and needing to actually look at the words I was reading).

Edit2:

NinKenDo Wrote:So if we want to sign up for 2.5, how do we sign up?

Registration for 2.5 won't be open until after this round ends. You can still register for this round, up until the 15th, I think. I know you can still register now though, since I just did.

apirx Wrote:

Stian Wrote:How do you manage that?! Do you have any tips on how to improve your reading speed? I can only read English and German at about 25-ish pages per hour. It's probably worth noting that I've got heavily reduced vision, but that's mitigated with Kindle anyway.

What happens with me while reading fast in Japanese is that I don't fixate my eyes on the individual kana, only on kanji words or verbs at the end of sentences. The rest is kinda clear from peripheral vision, only when the meaning isn't obvious do I look closer.

I can read about 40-50 pages an hour that way, which would make 600 in a day possible if I tried.

I read about 40 pages an hour as well. One important thing when trying to read faster is to not get fixated on pronouncing every word in your head. It also helps to read easier books that are also exciting at the same time. When I read a "harder" novel I reach max 30 pages / hour. The worst one I've read is at 15 pages / hour.

tashippy Wrote:Yeah, I have noticed that the leaderboard often has people who just play games. I don't even know what these games are like. Is it like a VN? I just read novels, on paper, so I really don't get it.
I figure it's a combination of some imbalance as you say and the ability (tendency?) of some gamers to sit for hours absorbed in a game. I know input is good, but I don't imagine these folks going out and using their language skills after sitting in front of whatever screen for a month straight. And is it a sense of competition or are they always gaming like this and just happen to tab their hours doing so during tadoku reading challenge?

I go by character count, divide by 20, and input as game.

Reading tons improves your reading speed by tons. You slow down everytime you start reading something harder, with a different writing style, or different topic/setting, but overall it only gets better.

Game text is advantageous in tadoku to some degree (though mostly implicitly).
There are often "..."'s in texts (I remove them though). This seems to add about 2% of text in the average passage.
VN's, more often than other media, have the protagonist run through similiar lines of thoughts, have similiar reoccuring descriptions or events. If nothing else, you go through a lot of dialogue with the set of characters.
With a texthooker, you can look up words very fast (~1-2 second for an english definition, ~5 seconds for a J-J definition).

I'm spending like 8 hours a day (and breaks) to read ~120 pages a day? But I'm sure there are people who can double or even close to triple my reading speed.

kameden Wrote:People who read VN's are usually NEET's who do nothing but that all day.

And that. When tadoku comes around, anyways.

Yeah that's exactly how it's done. Count the characters, 400 characters are one page, 20 are one game screen.

Also VN's tend to have more text than a single novel. The #1 person reads something like 300 pages / day. On physical books that's about 1 book / day. I'm not sure if I want to read 30 books in a month even though it's possible with enough time (something like 6-10 hours for me, which I don't have). Maybe it won't be so bad if I read a long LN series.

[Zgarbas]

@tashippy you can ask them yourself, you know .
I actually *have* been reading about 300 pages a day, but not in japanese =(. Hard to find time for tadoku. I did start by reading one of my school books in Japanese, only to realise when the essay about it was due that i can't associate the Japanese keyword with the concept properly... Reading academic papers in Japanese is still beyond my level, apparently >.<

Chronopolis: That's a really low reading speed even with books. I admire your dedication to spend 8 hours a day reading, but on average reading visual novels isn't *that* much quicker (obviously depends on the visual novel and book). I'd about ~5 pages per hour more with a not-so-light VN than with a digital fiction book, which is about... 5? pages per hour *at most* slower than an academic physical book. So, looking up terms every other sentence in the dictionary, making bookmarks etc. still leaves me with about 20 pages per hour (and if you care about tadoku, physical books get the perk of double-rowed page counting, so it counts as 30 ). When Mikku got 600 pages in a day he spent like 16 hours in a row playing the game, so that's not much quicker. Each with their own pace, I guess.

I've never played VN or whatever these games are but if it's an addictive way to get more input of course you know I'm down. I'm a little lazy to escape my current methods with a new one, so if anyone could recommend a quick and cheap way to get one of these games or VN's on a MacBook I'd give it a go. Either way I'll keep reading books for which I find the translations or have seen the movie, which tends to be easiest for me.

VNDB doesn't have a way to rank freeware VNs by score, but I believe True Remembrance is rated the highest. It's short and free of objectionable content; unfortunately, it's also unvoiced, but there's only so much awesome you can get for free.

https://twitter.com/arnaldosfjunio/statu...12/photo/1

btw, every vn can be unofficially voiced using ITH and Textaloud.

[RawToast]

Not a good weekend, I need to get back on track -- this 'World Cup' thing is rather distracting!

RawToast Wrote:Not a good weekend, I need to get back on track -- this 'World Cup' thing is rather distracting!

Haha, yes, but it's not bad for the speaking, eh?!