Not sure if others do this, but when reading in English I often skip over things like “he said quietly” and “she shouted in disbelief”, etc. All the stuff that surrounds the dialogue that rarely adds useful information. And in the rare case I get confused I simply go back and see what I missed. But I noticed a while ago that I never do this when reading in Japanese. When reading in Japanese I read everything. I wonder if it’s because I still can’t see at a glance what’s important to read, a simple lack of confidence, or if it’s something else entirely.
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No, I meant purely for getting a benchmark whether or not you can follow along with audiobook speed if nothing is hindering your reading. 
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apparently a page of a 文庫本 has somewhere between 500 and 800 characters.
that’s a pretty broad range. With my character numbers that could mean as little as 6 pages or as many as 30 pages. 
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I just realized I get stats now because I’m reading with a Kobo. I’m about halfway a book (Colorless Tsukuru) with 200k characters having read 11 hours, and the estimate is 8 hours more. So that comes to around 10.5k chars per hour. Not sure how that compares. Probably if I didn’t meticulously stop to check every irrelevant unknown word it could be a bit higher.
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So yesterday I decided that I’m going to give repeated reading a shot, and so I wrote up a rough outline of how I’m going to go about it and track the results. Not sure if this is interesting for people or not, but I think it’ll be fun to use myself as a guinea pig.
Since the whole document is quite lengthy, I’ll summarize it here:
Working off the papers I read, I’ll be tracking progress by using a practice text that will be used for repeated reading, and a control text that will be used for what I’m going to call the pre and post-tests. The practice and control texts are similar in difficulty but different in writing styles to hopefully control for becoming familiar with a specific author.
For the practice text, as I mentioned I decided to go with GJ部, as it is a relatively easy novel, and broken into short, episodic chapters. Most importantly, it also has an audiobook. For the control text, I settled on ひげを剃る. It’s rated similar in difficulty on both natively and JPDB, and has very similar statistics according to the later (the exception being ひげを剃る having slightly longer sentence length). The writing style between the two is different enough, however I am slightly worried the genres are too similar, so I’m open to changing the control.
At the start of the week, I’ll silently read a passage from the control text equal in length to the practice text and document the time. During the week I’ll try to do 2-3 repeated reading sessions, and then re-read the same passage from the control text at the end of the week, and document that time.
The repeated Reading sessions will look like this:
- Silently read the practice text passage once (Timed)
- Re-read the passage 1-2 more times along with the audiobook
- Take a 5-7 minute break (optional)
- Silently read the passage one final time (Timed)
- Document and comments about the session
I decided to avoid any word lookups during a session to avoid possibly affecting the results. I also should note that I still plan to read and do my regular immersion + anki, so this is entirely additive to my study routine.
I completed my first session earlier this morning, and so I’ll also include the results:
Control text character count: 1625
Control read time: 11m 40s
Control CPM: 139.25
Practice text character count: 1605
| Reading | First | Second (Audio) | Third (Audio) | Fourth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time | 10m 15s (10.25) | 5m 18s | 5m 18s | 8m 00s |
| CPM | 156.6 | 302.8 | 302.8 | 200.625 |
Comments:
- I found on the third read that I was moving slightly ahead of the narrator’s pace, but only for the first part of the sentence. Most likely because I started reading between the gaps in narration.
- The fourth read was far smoother than the first, and it felt like my eyes knew where to look.
- Barely subvocalized at all on the fourth read, and just read in my head.
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Ahh, I see what you mean now, my bad.
I was considering using something very easy, but I want to avoid books that don’t use a lot of kanji, and or have full furigana. It’s sort of counter-intuitive, but find that both these things can be distracting when trying to read digitally, though mostly the former (furigana is still great for paper books though). I have a digital copy of 時をかける少女 that doesn’t have furigana, so maybe that would work.
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Looks like the calculation assumes that all lines are full with text. So that number is just the maximum possible in some book.
With dialog, it’s easily below half of that number. And even descriptive text has sections, where the last line of a section is usually not full with text. And even at the start there are one or two characters missing to mark off the section start.
So I would think it’s more like 300-600 characters per page.
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I did a rows x columns count earlier today on my copy of レベル7. That is 16 columns of 38 characters a page, so a completely full page is 608 characters. But as you say you need to adjust for amount of whitespace on the page due to paragraph breaks, dialogue, etc.
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Ha, not very helpful then. 
I just did a quick calculation for the book I’m currently reading. I’m only 6% done, but based on my kindle’s prediction for how long it will take me to finish, I’ve spent about 1.57 hours reading. The part I read is apparently about 34k characters. So that works out to about 21k characters per hour or 360 per minute. Pretty sure I don’t trust that though. I think at some point the kindle is like “surely you’re not reading that slowly, you must have gotten distracted but left the screen on” and stops increasing the time left to finish the book. The book I’m reading now is pretty hard (L36 on Natively, which is 3-4 levels beyond my level for comfortable reading), so I end up rereading sentences at least once every few pages.
Looking at 本好き 21, which I read back in January, it says 21 hours and 41 minutes to read the whole book, which is 625k characters. This works out to 28k per hour or 480 per minute. While it makes sense that it’s a higher number than the other book since it’s much easier for me to read, I’m still not sure I trust it. A quick search indicates that the average reading speed for a Japanese high school student is 600-800 characters per minute, so that just reinforces my skepticism about those kindle numbers. While it is just an average, I’d find it hard to believe that I could be reading 本好き at 60-80% the speed of an average Japanese high school student.
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Damn, I thought I was reading at a comfortable speed and you are here reading 3x the pace!
Where did you get over 600k? That sounds way too long. JPDB has 194k characters for Honzuki 21. That would make it a bit more reasonable?
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I copied the text into Notepad++ and it told me a location number. Didn’t really think about it more deeply than that. Looking more closely, each character is counting as three for that metric (maybe because it’s UTF-8?). A different Notepad++ metric says 208k, which is much closer to the 194k JPDB claims. Assuming it’s 208k, that would make my 本好き 21 pace 9600 character per hour or 160 per minute, which sounds much more accurate. With the correct metric, that would also make my pace for the harder book (魔法少女育成計画 7) 7500 characters per hour or 125 per minute. All of that feels much more reasonable.
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196k says my epub reader, so calculating with 200k and 350 pages means 本好き has on average around 570 characters per page. Since 本好き books are pretty big, your average LN will probably fall lower than that… maybe 450 characters per page?
10k per hour is considered a decent speed for a learner in the learning community, though. So you are right there. 
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レベル７ has almost 300k characters
and at 665 pages, it comes to around 450 characters per page. 
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My edition is 777 pages (767 excluding the kaisetsu), which would be about 390 characters a page. That implies an average of 2/3rds of eery page being text and 1/3 blank space, which doesn’t feel obviously wrong flipping through it.
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Decided to hold off on posting each session since I didn’t want to spam the thread, so here’s the whole week’s stats (each date uses one chapter of GJ部 as a passage):
| Reading | First | Second (Audio) | Third (Audio) | Fourth | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19/6/2023 | |||||
| Time | 10m 15s (10.25) | 5m 18s | 5m 18s | 8m 00s | |
| CPM | 156.6 | 302.8 | 302.8 | 200.625 | |
| 21/6/2023 | |||||
| Time | 8m 55s (8.92m) | 5m 38s (5.63) | 5m 38s (5.63) | 7m 25s (7.42) | |
| CPM | 170 | 270 | 270 | 204.9 | |
| 24/6/2023 | |||||
| Time | 9m 33s (9.55) | 5m 42s (5.70) | 5m 42s (5.70) | 7m 33s (7.55) | |
| CPM | 171.31 | 287.01 | 287.01 | 216.69 |
And for the post-test comparison (using ひげを剃る):
| Pre-test | Post-test | |
|---|---|---|
| Time | 11m 40s (11.67) | 9m 51s (9.85) |
| CPM | 139.25 | 165 |
It’s probably too early to offer any real insights, however I have been feeling a bit more confident in my reading pace with each session. Also, if anyone has suggestions for a better control book it would be appreciated; I am definitely not a fan of ひげを剃る.
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I guess くまクマ熊ベアー is really easy and fits your criteria?
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Reading more will be the best base vanilla advice. Something I would also suggest is maybe picking a format that only shows a couple lines at a time like VNs, RPGs, or a show with Japanese subtitles. This way you don’t get overwehlmed and I think you can learn to skim sentences this way too. Just an idea. Good luck!
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I tried using it today and it was pretty straight forward, and also kind of interesting. I might actually just start reading through it normally tomorrow after I’m done with the LN club reading.
I actually do all of these pretty much every day, so it’s definitely good advice! I do immersion for at least around 2+ hours a day, and I am currently mining to support 18 new words a day in Anki.
I don’t think my reading speed is a matter of getting overwhelmed by the amount of text on the page, and I’m actually trying to avoid skimming. I did originally mention being overwhelmed by trying to keep up with the audiobook for 本好き, but I should also probably mention that since last week I’ve gotten more comfortable with following along at audio book pace. With GJ部 I’ve been finding the pacing to be just right, and with 本好き I have zero issues with x0.9 speed now.
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I strongly advise against optimizing for reading speed. It can be a helpful metric when considered with other metrics like comprehension level, comfort, enjoyment, and consistency.
There’s nothing wrong with going slow, taking in every に and が particle, and quizzing yourself the semantic function of those particles in that context to reinforce your syntactic knowledge of Japanese.
There’s nothing wrong either with skimming and focusing on subjects and predicates so you can quickly add a bunch of vocabulary to your Anki deck.
I pause quite frequently when I see an interesting sentence to ask myself how I would have expressed the same idea myself in Japanese, compare my construction with the author’s, and examine any grammatical gaps I have that are preventing me from constructing more natural sounding sentences.
Ever since the vaguely defined idea of retention = number of contacts * quality of contact in academia went mainstream, everyone’s goal of improving retention has been to read more and read faster, when it’s definitely a much more complicated subject.
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If comprehension is the goal, slow and steady wins the race. But that’s the difference between extensive reading (reading but not checking) and intensive reading (looking up every new word or grammar).
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