The 7 Skills of Speed Reading (Udemy.com)

The course was good and I liked it pretty much. However, for me it lacked on sharing personal experiences of the lecturers on how they have learned to speed read and how much time it took for them to reach their corresponding levels. It would have provided a great motivation, as well as understanding on what can be expected from training. Personally, I didn't like how it structured. I would enjoy longer lessons much more. Having 2-4 min lessons and watching intros half of the time of the course feels like wasting my time. While it is great that lecturers don't bring your expectations too high with telling great success stories (like Evelyn Wood school teacher do), I still needed this course to be more personal and more informational on that part. E.g. how much did they train a day, what was speed at the beginning, how did they improve over time, etc. Extremely valuable and interesting information, but it wasn't there. Regarding the audio quality - I would much more appreciate if May Ling and Katya both had microphones and intro audio effect was on the same volume level as the rest of the video. How it is now is a headache, - you need to regulate the volume up and down instead of concentrating on what is taught. Also, some effects of Jackie screaming, etc. it was like screamers from the horror movies. Would be nice if they weren't there. The last episode of the course, 115, seems to infer some continuation, it's not there either.

This course is just what I need. I read very slow, too slow to study properly my phonetics and vocabulary both need lots of improvement. I am still reading words. but I think I start to get the feel of reading concepts in sentences. Going over the classes a second time helps me to reinforce because I progress slowly. And going ahead in the classes helps me to understand where I am heading to. I am still focusing on basics and yet sometimes I focus on the mechanics. learning different aspects during the week. I hope to see more improvement soon.

Before I signed up for this course, I read word for word and will take 3 days to a week to finish reading a book. The irony is that even though I took so long to read the book, I don’t remember the contents in the book I’m a gamer and I can still remember where the traps and treasure chests were in the maze even if the game was 20 years ago. When you guys read a book, do you read the prologue, foreword, acknowledgements etc, or do you usually skip them altogether? Also when you come across an unfamiliar word in a sentence or paragraph, do you search for its meaning before moving forward, or do you accumulate a list of unfamiliar words in a day/week and learn them as a clutter? I love reading, just that I don’t know the proper way of reading more effectively. The whole course is great, the only thing that affect the experience is that the videos having errors streaming on my ipad. I have to refresh the page after every video for 115 times. Other than that all is good

This is possibly the best value course I've ever taken! I've started applying the techniques, and even after a few days, I feel my reading speed has already doubled or tripled. However, I should explain a bit more about my background and the reason I took this course. I'm a language teacher for international students in Australia, so I already know a lot about essay structure and cohesive devices etc. The main reason I took the course is that I have so many books I want to read, I simply want to be able to read faster to get through them all! The most important sections for me were probably the ones on subvocalization and thought units. By not understanding these, I had been forever condemned to read below the spoken word barrier. However, by applying the lessons from this course, I've been able to read 'chunks' at a single glance, and even though I'm reading much faster, I don't feel like I'm going through it in fast forward. I'm so grateful to May Ling and Katya for producing this course. I guess what attracted me to it at first is that they stressed it was not just 'advanced skimming' techniques, which is what I understood speed reading to be from the couple of books I'd read about. As for the presentation videos themselves, I found them very relaxing and interesting to watch. Both May Ling and Katya present in a way that is both informative and pleasant to watch. I hope both presenters read this so that I can pass on how grateful I am for this wonderful material which is going to have a massive and long-term impact on my life.

The course is very well structured, and May Ling and Katya appears very knowledgeable. I found answers and information in this corse that really should be a distinct part of what is thaught in schools when it comes to reading (which it was not when I went to school at least). If this was taught in primary and/or secondary school (or even highschool), I would not have gone through life this far being a type 2 reader, reading word by word, subvocalizing every word. I was maybe hoping for more detailed description on the specific techniques for reading thought units and braking the spoken word barrier, but the information given may very well be enough. I'm exited to try and set it into practice, and hopefully I can enter 2022 with a new reading ability, comfortably reading twice my current speed - or maybe even faster. Thumbs up for this course!

This is by far my favorite course ever. It is a thorough well-structured course that takes back the student to the basics. By using clear convincing examples, the lecturers show that some popular beliefs cannot be taken for granted. Take the hamburger structure, for example. Whilst many assert that it might be enough to read the first sentence of one paragraph (thanks to such structure), they prove that the reader might be losing vital information and, more importantly, the reading comprehension of the whole text. Do not expect to receive some pieces of advice on "magic technics" as opening a page of the book and read it as if you had taken a picture. I would rather say that it is the "Karate Kid course" for speed reading. You could find no sense in painting fences or washing cars but, at the end of the day, it is worthy. I believe that any person wanting to get into speed reading must try several technics and listen to different points of view, however, this course is a "must". Congratulations to the lecturers and thanks for sharing your knowledge. Best regards! Alejandro.

So far, I'm only half way through the course, but I have found the different elements that comprise the method of learning speed reading extremely helpful, creative and insightful! I am also wondering why such things have not been talked about in other courses on speed reading which is very surprising to me. One thought that I would find interesting would to be to explain more on the details on lesson 57 - "Non-Mechanical Subvocalistion" - as to the expectations and experiences of the reader as they go from an average 150 word/min reader to a 300-500 word/min reader in doing this exercise. For e.g., when and how these jumps will occur, from 150 to 500 and beyond, and how it feels in ourselves as we experience these progressions. I haven't broken the spoken word reading barrier, however I am presuming that the following lessons and modules will feed into this practice of lesson 57 in order for us to improve. Is this correct? Great course by the way!

I greatly appreciate how much time and effort Katya and May Ling have put into organizing this course. It seems to be extremely comprehensive even offering comparisons with other methods of speed reading. In addition, they are also be aware of viewers' potential reactions or skepticism and are very smart about progressing through the classes lucidly and smoothly. My only criticism is that they should both be wearing the same microphone(s) (May Ling isn't wearing one), so that the sound is the same, they should use some basic lighting to remove distracting shadows from the wall behind them, and that the screen from which they are reading below the camera or phone lens probably could be higher so it is not as obvious as to when they are reading. Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message" and I wish the aesthetics were as stellar as the content and presentation.

I recommend this course. It has helped me to review my own reading style and purpose and results. I'm getting some new reading glasses. Understanding the author's message, mental outlining and note taking are takeaways for me. May Ling's supplementary 100 Books in 100 Days provides an excellent example of effective speed reading (available on Instagram at whereismayling or at goodreads.com under May Ling). I appreciate the synergistic benefits of reading a variety of books each distilling a part of the world around us. Using May Ling's reviews I found Melinda Gates' The Moment of Lift a good book for speed reading - clearly written with the reader in mind. Another recommendation, Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach is too technical and invites too many thought experiments for me to read speedily. Still "7 Skills" emphasis on comprehension and retention is serving me well.

Been through the first part and haven't learned anything that isn't common sense. I really hope this course gets better because all the talk about how we learn and infer word meaning is boring. Why I am being told to learn 20-30 new words a week? What does that have to do with reading faster unless my vocabulary is too small for the things I am trying to read? I haven't learned anything useful about how to speed read yet, I am disappointed so far. Too much repetition of the same simple obvious concepts. Now 75% of the way through the course, and I still haven't learned anything meaningful. Found it excruciating to listen to lots of mumbo jumbo explanations that really add nothing to being a better speed reader. No special revelations how to become a faster reader other than practice. I don't need input on what type of books to read, how to prepare to read, etc... I've given up on this course, IMO it was a waste of time since I already know how to read. My review is very negative because my expectation was high and was completely let down by the course.