Kognition,

I'm just trying out photoreading right now, primarily because I'm trying to learn another language and I need a boost. When reading your posts, I think you are a bit off on some of your interpretations.

1) Previewing. Before photoreading, I previewed. Everybody does. If you read the back cover of the book before you buy it, you are previewing. When it came to fiction, I did very little previewing. When it was a history book or how-to manual, I flipped through the book to get a feel. That's previewing, at least to me. All I've done with photoreading is to formalize that a tiny bit more, by pulling out a few key words (which I was doing anyways, just not bothering to note them).

2) The selling point here is photoreading. The idea is that here is something you can do for a brief period of time that will maximize your reading. So I'm taking them up on that "challenge". I am studying (ie activating) my books at a pace that is comfortable to me, but I'm photoreading those books and a few related ones (dictionary) every night. Basically, I've added 20 minutes a day to my study time; in theory, the payoff will be over the long term as I find it easier to plow through the stuff.

3) Every person here has described photoreading as a skill; to me that makes it like shooting foul shots, and I'm a weak child. I may not even hit the rim on my first attempts, so I'm not going to worry about it for now. I'll just keep going through the motions, trying to keep my breathing and rythm right, keep the soft focus (getting the focus is easy for me; keeping it over time is tough), and we'll see where I'm at in a week. I'm certainly not going to struggle to see the blip page on every page.

4) Just because you read fast doesn't mean you learn fast. You could read 1,000,000 words a second, but you don't necessarily learn at that pace. There's a difference between remembering words and learning concepts. In my way of thinking, photoreading should make it easier for that information to get into my thick skull: what my thick skull does with it after that is a different story.

Personally, the jury is still out for me, but I'm giving photoreading a bit of time (weeks) before I render judgement. It's a very cheap investment in time anyways; if it doesn't work, I haven't lost much, if it does work, then hopefully learning this language won't be so freakin' hard and I'll be happy (and apply my new talent to other areas).

-jeff

[This message has been edited by Jaif (edited March 09, 2005).]