There are many reasons a person might want to learn to speed read. Students or just interested learners of a given subject, know that effective speed reading would give a huge advantage to the student. Much of the world’s best educational material is written down, so if you can read and comprehend that information quickly you will be able to learn a lot with your reading time.
Sadly, most people can’t speed read and the organisations which promise to be able to teach you are for-profit and out of the reach of most students. But there are free solutions available, and Readfa.st has proven itself to be a very good free solution at that. Readfa.st lets you easily line up your own reading material from the Internet and at the same time use the service as a game to teach you effective speed reading. You can even compete against your friends and check out what they’re reading.
How To Get Started With Readfa.st
Readfa.st is a free, online service which lets you set up an account quickly and easily either with an email address or a Facebook Connect login.
Test How Fast You Can Read
The first thing to do using Readfa.st is to test how fast you currently read. This means Readfa.st can set your minimum reading speed and ensure all the documents you read are optimised just for you.
After you have read the passage, Readfa.st can quiz you on the content to ensure you have understood correctly.
You can then continue to test yourself by reading passages from within Readfa.st or move on to reading your own chosen content. Readfa.st can offer you a list of its most popular content to read if you want to try something new and interesting.
Read Online Documents Faster
Using the Readfa.st bookmarklet, you can quickly take the text of any webpage and read it using Readfa.st.
As Readfa.st makes a list of your documents, it can easily be used as a short-term read it later style list. Although, you wouldn’t want it to get too long or it would become unwieldy.
While reading, you can control Readfa.st by using “s” for slower, “f” for faster and space bar to pause/start the text.
Learn Speed Reading Online
Readfa.st doesn’t just offer you a speed reading experience, it helps to teach you how to improve your reading speed. With every passage you read you can record your speed, meaning you can see how you’ve improved over time.
If you have used Facebook Connect, your Readfa.st account can easily be used to compare your reading speeds with friends and have a little bit of friendly competition. If not, you’ll need to add friends manually at this stage. Hopefully soon they’ll make it possible for users who signed up with an email address to connect their accounts to Facebook later in order to find their friends and sync profile pictures.
If you have no friends on Readfa.st you can always compare your results with the top readers on the Readfa.st leaderboard.
Here’s some more great articles on learning how to speed read that you might like:
- 3 Ways You Can Learn To Speed Read Online
- 5 Text Reader Apps That Really Help You Speed Read
- 6 Bookmarklets That Will Boost Your Web Surfing Speed & Productivity
- Make Skim Your Ultimate Reading & Study Tool For PDF Files [Mac]
How do online speed reading applications like Readfa.st help you? Are there some texts which work better than others?
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Hide 4 Comments
Arun,
I don’t know of any alternative myself, however, this would be a good question for MakeUseOf Answers.
I don’t know of any, but that would be pretty useful! I’ll keep an eye out and write about it if I see something.
is there a way to check my students reading speed in a reliable way. they may not tell me the truth about the line they are reading. i dont have the access to a eyechase machine.
I think the best you can do is to get them to take their reading test and then give them a comprehension test on the material afterwards. Readfast does this for some passages of text if you want to try it.