Just clocked up 53 hours to read (I use the term loosely!) 47% of a book at a sloth-like 0.05 pgs/min
Can anyone beat that?
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Dang. Out of curiosity, what was the book and language?
Slowest speed… It’s tough to say; I don’t normally keep track of my reading speed, for better or worse. It certainly felt like I was reading a page every 5 minutes or so earlier on in my Japanese learning, but I don’t have any hard numbers written down to back that up, sadly.
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Japanese, ダンジョンに出会いを求めるのは間違っているだろうか 1
It’s difficulty is about 10 levels above where my ability level is probably at. Intenstive reading at its most intense! But I read a few books around my level that I wasn’t particularly interested in and it was hard to keep motivated. Reading the light novels of some of my favourite anime was one of the reasons I started learning Japanese, so I’m slogging my way through this.
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When I read Harry Potter in Japanese (my first book) I was reading a physical copy at the speedy pace of one page every 15 minutes 
I finished the book at around 5 minutes per page but then of course things were hard again on my next few books.
I haven’t tracked my reading speed in a long time but I know some of the particularly difficult Aozora texts (Meiji era or just unusual style with lots of old kanji) my speed takes a significant hit.
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If you’re able to read the first HP in Swedish this year, I’d be curious how your reading speed compares then, given Swedish’s closer relation to English (than Japanese, at least).
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It won’t be a perfect comparison as I read HP 2 in Japanese and I have HP 3 in Swedish but I do plan to track my time. My goal is to try it before EOY which would be a crazy fast time line compared to Japanese
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Slowest speed for me was about 6 hours to try to read 4 pages of 風の影. It was the first bookclub book I read in a multilingual bookclub about 6 months after starting to properly study Japanese. It a bunko size book so those are pretty small pages and it has no furigana.
I did not manage to translate much into proper English and also didn’t manage to understand virtually anything of what I read.
I really just wanted to see what I might understand and what I needed to work on most which at that point I understood very little and needed to work on everything 
It is a level 30+ book (no reviews or gradings yet) and is the Japanese translation of La Sombra Del Viento. I still plan to read it and the last time I tried to read a little, I did understand a lot more a lot quicker but I only read a page or two second time around.
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I drop stuff, if I get too slow - as for me that’s a sign that it is not for my current level. I bow to anyone who has the willpower to push through that. I don’t have it in me.
Generally, I try to keep my reading speed between 5000 and 10000 characters per hour (which equates approx. to 10-20 pages).
now you just need 4 more languages to finish HP. 
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I’ve got .18 pgs/min as my lowest tracked in July 2023. ソードアート・オンライン27 ユナイタル・リングVI | L33
Edit: I still don’t read that fast, but that’s painful to think about lol
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When I started my first novel in 本好きの下剋上, I was at 0.10 pgs/min. By the end I got to 0.50 pgs/min. Part of that was general reading improvement, but a lot was also a lot of the frontloaded fantasy vocab.
It’s possible that I was slower when I started my very first manga ルリドラゴン、but I wasn’t tracking time then. Certainly in a characters/min basis I was slower, but not sure about pages/min given how much less text dense manga is.
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My slowest is 소리를 보는 소년 | L27 from bookclub. It’s currently sitting at 0.1 pages per minute. I’d say that can be chalked up to the vocab, since there are quite a lot of historical words and lots of specific words, I need to look up a lot of things. I can’t even imagine how slow I would be if I didn’t have the google sheets vocab list.
But hey, at least it’s faster than when I first tried to read it back in November. At the time, I read a whopping one page, in 50 minutes. That’s 0.02 pages per minute. Needless to say, I decided read it later on.
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Wow, I do not have that level of patience. That’s amazing.
My cap is 2 minutes per page, anything above that then I drop the book. I want my reading experience to be smooth and fluid otherwise is just feels like a chore.
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Not sure if that counts, but:
While I was reading the last part of Harry Potter (in German), I stopped in the middle of the book because I was too scared (I was 12 back then lmao, don’t sue me 
). It took me about 500 days after starting to read it for the first time to finally finish it. The book has 752 pages, so that is 1.504 pages per day, or about 0.001 pgs/min.
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With that condition I wouldn’t be reading anything
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I never time myself when I read, but I’m pretty sure the slowest I’ve ever read was when I tried reading Tatami Galaxy, mostly because of the difficulty but also because I just despised the MC. That’s still the only JP book I’ve ever dropped.
Well, after I started getting comfortable with reading, at any rate. I almost certainly did take longer when I first started out reading 2.43 since that was the very first thing I tried reading and hadn’t even properly started learning yet, but it sure didn’t feel that slow.
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I can read a (light)novel (physical and without vocab list) in the mid 30 levels at 6 pages per hour in its easy parts and 2 pages per hour where it’s more difficult. Especially unknown kanji slow down look-ups.
Well that was last year. I plan to read episode two of some of these novels this year and will see if there is a difference.
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replying to old thread.
As a newbie learning English, I watch and listen to podcasts about English, productivity, etc., so I can learn something new. In my opinion, playback speed depends on the topic. If the topic is difficult, we should listen more slowly, so I usually listen at normal speed. However, if the podcast or audiobook is easy to understand, I can go with 1.25x speed.
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That’s such a nice thread! 
I’m usually a slow reader. Both in my native language and in Japanese. So I feel comfortable reading at that speed.
Last week I tracked my reading speed and got 5-6 pages in 25 minutes. Learnnatively gives me 0,2 pgs/min for that 
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Yeah, I think pages per hour would be a better unit, so that probably everyone gets numbers greater one.
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