Increasing Chinese Craze for Fast Reading

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 29, 2002

Increasing Chinese Craze for Fast Reading

"Inhale-exhale-slowly, slowly. Bring the air down to your pubic region." It's time for fast reading class, Wang Xuexian style.

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"Inhale-exhale-slowly, slowly. Bring the air down to your pubic region." It's time for fast reading class, Wang Xuexian style.

Accompanied with lively, soft music and the tick of a metronome, more than 300 students in a neat, spacious auditorium are shuffling their books like west winds.

Chen Han, a second grader at the Xicheng (West Urban District) Foreign Languages School in Beijing, said, "I could read only 280 characters a minute in the past, and now I can take in as many as 6,000."

Wang founded China's first fast-reading school in 1993, after years of meticulous investigation into oriental and Western theories. He said an average student of his can upgrade his reading speed 10 times from 300 words to more than 3,000 characters a minute after attending a down-to-earth training course of 30 class hours in five days.

More and more Chinese are apt to take fast reading classes. students come across China from the border city of Heihe at its northernmost tip in northeastern Heilongjiang province, straight down to the southernmost Hainan Island's Sanya city, which is dubbed as country's "remotest corners", Their ages range from eight to 74 years.

"This is no miracle," Wang said, "The key is to move your eyeballs swiftly, shuffle your books and concentrate on eight to 10 characters at a time. My fast reading enables you to remember at least 60 percent of the content."

However, relevant statistics from the China Reading Association(CRA) available show that the vast majority of Chinese school children at primary and high schools cannot read at a speed of 2,000 characters per minute. And quite a number of fifth-graders could merely read 600 per minute.

In the information explosion age of today, Wang said, there is a danger a nation that reads slowly will not be able to overtake other nations and land itself in a passive position. "Only when its people are able to do fast reading," he added, "can the nationsave tremendous amounts of precious time and be invincible."

Chinese people are finding themselves very short of time, in anera when Internet use is rapidly expanding and with more than 100,000 books having being published annually since the 1990s.

Hu Xiao, a woman sub-editor at a major Beijing-based newspaper,sent his son during his holiday to Wang's class.

Hu said, "I would very much like to attend Wang's class myself.Buried in piles of stories and documents on her desk everyday, fast reading would save me time."

Prof. Wang Yunfeng at the Capital Teachers' University in Beijing, said, "Fast reading skills are based on science. The reason that many people read slowly is because of the fact that they read word by word instead of reading by phrases or sentences. One can also tailor their reading speed to either intensive or extensive reading."

Zeng Xiangqin, director of the CRA, said that research studies on fast reading have a history of over 80 years abroad and the experimental practices has been proven so successful and effective,whereas on the Chinese mainland they cover only a matter of 20 years.

"With China opening its doors still wider to the outside world,and its access into the WTO in particular," Zeng said, "fast reading classes are enjoying a growing popularity here. Over a dozen provinces have their fast reading icons and thousands of students."

"Fast reading is a rudimental skill that anyone should and can acquire," he added.

An Asian international symposium on reading is expected to be held in Beijing in 2004.

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