Tachi is a free speed-reading trainer that pairs 9 short drills with an RSVP reader. The drills warm up your eyes, widen what you notice around the point you are looking at, and sharpen quick word recognition. The reader then has you practise on real text at a pace you set, between 100 and 1000 words per minute. A full session takes about ten minutes.
What to expect, honestly
Research on reading is clear that speed and comprehension trade off: no method has been shown to double or triple reading speed while keeping full understanding (Rayner et al., 2016). Average adult silent reading in English is about 238 words per minute for non-fiction (Brysbaert, 2019), and the main limit is how fast the mind recognises words and builds meaning, not how fast the eyes move.
Tachi is therefore best understood as structured practice. The drills train attention, visual search and recognition on the drill tasks themselves; evidence that such exercises carry over to everyday reading speed is weak. The reader gives you paced practice on real text, which is the part most closely tied to how reading improves. Always judge progress by what you understood, not by the WPM number alone.
The three skills
- Warm up. Loosen up your eye muscles before you read. Drills: 13-Point Eye Workout, Circular Eye Motion, Hourglass Focus.
- Widen your span. Take in more with every glance. Drills: Schulte Table, Peripheral Letters.
- Sharpen recognition. Recognise and find words in an instant. Drills: Tachistoscope, Word Search, Similar Words, Text Scan.
Warm up
- What it trains:
- Deliberate, accurate gaze shifts across the whole screen.
- How to do it:
- A dot appears at twelve clock positions around the screen and then at the centre, staying two seconds at each. Follow it with your eyes only, keeping your head still.
- Options:
- Duration: 30, 60 or 120 seconds.
- Suggested time:
- 30 seconds.
Open 13-Point Eye Workout
- What it trains:
- Smooth pursuit: following a moving target without jerks.
- How to do it:
- A dot travels clockwise around a circle, one lap every three seconds. Track it smoothly without moving your head.
- Options:
- Duration: 30, 60 or 120 seconds.
- Suggested time:
- 30 to 60 seconds.
Open Circular Eye Motion
- What it trains:
- Steady focus on a point while tracking movement towards and away from it.
- How to do it:
- Two dots move from the top and bottom of the screen to the centre and back out again in a four-second loop. Watch them pinch in and open out.
- Options:
- Duration: 30, 60 or 120 seconds.
- Suggested time:
- 30 to 60 seconds.
Open Hourglass Focus
Widen your span
- What it trains:
- Visual search and awareness of what lies around the point you are looking at.
- How to do it:
- A grid of shuffled numbers appears. Tap them in ascending order, starting from 1, as fast as you can; try to keep your gaze near the centre. The run is timed, wrong taps are counted and your best time for each grid size is saved.
- Options:
- Grid size: 3×3, 4×4 or 5×5.
- Suggested time:
- One to two minutes (two or three grids).
Open Schulte Table
- What it trains:
- Identifying letters that appear away from the point of fixation.
- How to do it:
- Look at the centre mark. One to three letters flash for a quarter of a second at random positions around it, in up to eight directions. Type the letters you saw, in any order; the drill scores the share you got right.
- Options:
- Rounds: 5 to 20. Letters per round: 1, 2 or 3.
- Suggested time:
- About two minutes (ten rounds).
Open Peripheral Letters
Sharpen recognition
- What it trains:
- Recognising a whole word from a single brief glimpse.
- How to do it:
- After a short fixation mark, a word flashes and disappears. Type it back. A session is ten words, and the flash gets shorter with each level, from 200 milliseconds at level 1 to 5 milliseconds at level 10.
- Options:
- Word length: 3, 4, 5 or 6 letters. Level: 1 to 10.
- Suggested time:
- One to two minutes (ten words).
Open Tachistoscope
- What it trains:
- Selective attention: picking one word out of a field of others.
- How to do it:
- A target word is shown above a grid of words. Tap the target in the grid. A session is ten rounds; correct answers, mistakes and total time are reported.
- Options:
- Grid size: 3×3, 4×4 or 5×5.
- Suggested time:
- About one minute (ten rounds).
Open Word Search
- What it trains:
- Telling apart words that look almost the same.
- How to do it:
- A target word is shown with four choices: the word itself and three look-alikes that differ by one or two letters. Tap the exact match. A session is twenty rounds.
- Options:
- None.
- Suggested time:
- One to two minutes (twenty rounds).
Open Similar Words
Text Scan
- What it trains:
- Scanning running text for a known word.
- How to do it:
- A short passage appears with a target word. Tap every occurrence of the target before the countdown ends. The result shows how many you found and how many wrong taps you made.
- Options:
- Duration: 20, 30, 45 or 60 seconds.
- Suggested time:
- 30 seconds.
Open Text Scan
The reader
The reader uses rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): text is shown one chunk at a time, or highlighted chunk by chunk, at the speed you choose. You can paste text, import a PDF, EPUB, TXT or Markdown file, or start with a built-in passage. Files are converted to text in your browser and are not uploaded.
Reader modes compared
The six reader modes in Tachi|
| Flash | One chunk at a time | The current chunk at a fixed point between two fixation marks. With one word per chunk, the letter at the optimal recognition point is coloured. | Classic RSVP practice; the default mode. |
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| Bionic | One chunk at a time | The current chunk with the first part of every word in bold and the rest lighter. | Readers who like a visual anchor in each word. |
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| Fade | One chunk at a time | The current chunk, with the previous chunk faintly above it and the next chunk faintly below. | Keeping a little context while still reading at one spot. |
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| Wide | One chunk at a time | The current chunk between two guide dots at the left and right edges, without fixation marks. | Multi-word chunks, where you take in a whole phrase per glance. |
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| Highlight | Full text | The whole passage, scrolling, with the current chunk in bold accent colour and the text already read dimmed. | Paced reading that keeps sentences and paragraphs visible. |
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| Pacer | Full text | The whole passage dimmed, with the current chunk underlined in the accent colour. | Following a moving guide, like a finger under the line. |
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Reader settings
- Speed: 100 to 1000 words per minute in steps of 25; the default is 300.
- Chunk size: 1 to 7 words shown together.
- Smart chunking: fits each chunk to a character budget, so several short words can share a chunk while a long word stands alone.
- Pause on punctuation: a chunk that ends a sentence stays on screen twice as long, and one that ends with a comma, semicolon, colon or dash one and a half times as long.
- Audio metronome: an optional click on every chunk.
- Appearance: 9 reader themes, 7 fonts (including OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Lexend) and adjustable font size.
- Navigation: pause, step one chunk back or forward, or drag the progress bar. Tachi remembers your position in each text.
A ten-minute daily routine
This plan uses the drills at their shortest settings and ends with five minutes of reading. The times are approximate, and the plan is a practical suggestion rather than a research-tested dose.
A ten-minute daily Tachi routine|
| 0:00–0:30 | Warm up | 13-Point Eye Workout | Run the 30-second setting. Move only your eyes. |
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| 0:30–1:00 | Warm up | Circular Eye Motion | Run the 30-second setting and track the dot smoothly. |
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| 1:00–2:00 | Widen your span | Schulte Table | Do one or two 4×4 grids; move to 5×5 when 4×4 feels easy. |
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| 2:00–3:30 | Widen your span | Peripheral Letters | Ten rounds with two letters. Keep your eyes on the centre mark. |
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| 3:30–4:30 | Sharpen recognition | Tachistoscope | Ten words at a level where you get most right; go up a level when you score 9 or 10. |
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| 4:30–5:00 | Sharpen recognition | Text Scan | One 30-second scan. |
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| 5:00–10:00 | Read | Reader | Read your own text for five minutes at a pace where you follow nearly everything. Raise the speed by 25 WPM only while that stays true. |
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Short on time? Skip to the reading block: paced reading of real text is the part of the routine that matters most.
Sources
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34.
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
- Snell, J. (2024). No, Bionic Reading does not work. Acta Psychologica, 247, 104304.
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