How to Read Faster in a Second Language: What Works

To read faster in a second language, read a lot of text that is easy for you. Reading in a second language is slower mainly because each word takes longer to recognise, and the cure is the same as it was in your first language: meeting words thousands of times until they become automatic. In practice that means building vocabulary until you know about 98% of the words in what you read, and spending most of your reading time on extensive, enjoyable material such as graded readers. Speed-reading tricks do little until those foundations are in place.

How much slower is reading in a second language?

Noticeably slower, even for good speakers. In his 2019 review of reading rate, Marc Brysbaert notes that second-language reading below 100 words per minute is not unusual. Two studies he discusses give a sense of the range:

For comparison, adults reading English as a first language average about 238 WPM for non-fiction (see average reading speed).

The eye-movement data in the novel study show where the time goes. In their second language, readers made more fixations, shorter jumps and skipped fewer words, a pattern that resembles children reading in their first language. The number of times they looked back was the same in both languages. In other words, second-language readers are not slower because of bad habits such as regressing; they are slower because recognising each word takes longer. That is a vocabulary and exposure problem, and it responds to reading, not to eye drills.

How many words do you need to know to read comfortably?

Research on vocabulary coverage asks what share of the words in a text a learner must already know to understand it. The figures most often quoted come from three studies:

• 98% for comfortable reading. Hu and Nation (2000) concluded that most learners need to know about 98% of the running words, about one unknown word in 50, to understand a fiction text adequately without help.
• 95% as a minimum. Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) proposed 95% coverage, reached with about 4,000 to 5,000 word families, as a minimal threshold for reading with support, and 98%, reached with about 8,000, as the optimal one.
• 8,000 to 9,000 word families for real-world text. Nation (2006) calculated that reaching 98% coverage of written English such as novels and newspapers takes a vocabulary of 8,000 to 9,000 word families. A word family is a word with its inflected and derived forms (read, reads, reader, readable).

Treat these as guides, not laws. A 2023 replication of Hu and Nation by Kremmel and colleagues could not fully reproduce the original results, and comprehension also depends on background knowledge and the kind of text. But the arithmetic behind them is easy to feel:

At 95% coverage you stumble on a new word every couple of lines. No reading technique can make that fast. Raising your coverage, or choosing text that already matches it, is what lets speed come.

Does extensive reading make you read faster?

Extensive reading means reading large amounts of easy, self-chosen material for meaning and enjoyment, as opposed to working slowly through a short difficult text. The evidence for it is reasonably consistent.

• A meta-analysis by Jeon and Day (2016) pooled 49 studies with 5,919 participants and found small to medium positive effects of extensive reading on reading proficiency, with larger effects for adults than for children and teenagers.
• Beglar and Hunt (2014) looked at the Japanese university students who made the largest gains in reading rate over an academic year. They had read about 200,000 words, mostly in simplified books up to the 1,600-headword level. The authors propose 200,000 words a year as a minimum target and found simplified texts more effective for building speed than unsimplified ones.

200,000 words sounds like a lot, but at 100 WPM it is about 33 hours of reading: under six minutes a day across a year, or 40 minutes a day, five days a week, for ten weeks.

How to choose graded readers and easy texts

Graded readers are books written or adapted for learners within a fixed vocabulary, often labelled by headword count or by CEFR level (A1 to C2). To find your level:

1. Open a book at a random page and count the words you do not know on that page.
2. On a page of about 300 words, more than 6 unknown words means the book is for study, not for speed. Two to six is good for extensive reading. Almost none is ideal for speed practice.
3. Read the page at a comfortable pace. If you can retell it in two or three sentences, the level fits.
4. Move up a level only when books at your current level feel effortless, and keep some very easy books for speed practice.

For speed practice in particular, the text should be almost too easy. You are training quick recognition of words you already know, not learning new ones. The same principle applies to reading in chunks: phrases only group naturally when every word in them is familiar.

How to use Tachi to practise reading in another language

Tachi's interface is available in 29 languages, and switching languages in Settings also switches its built-in content: six short lessons about reading, written in that language, and the word lists used by the recognition drills. That gives you ready-made practice text in, for example, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic or Polish.

• Your own texts in any language. Paste text or import a PDF, EPUB or plain-text file in whatever language you are learning. The reader works on any script, including right-to-left ones.
• Languages without spaces.Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not separate words with spaces. The reader uses your browser's built-in word segmenter to split them into words, so one-word-at-a-time display and words-per-minute pacing still work. The same applies to Lao, Khmer and Burmese.
• Slow speeds. The reader goes down to 100 WPM in steps of 25, which suits second-language reading, and you can pause or step back a chunk at any time.

The Tachistoscope drill flashes a word from the current language's list for a fraction of a second and asks you to type it. In a second language it is a quick way to practise recognising common words at a glance; it does not teach new vocabulary.

A weekly plan for faster second-language reading

1. Every day, 20 to 40 minutes of extensive reading in a graded reader or easy book at the level described above. No dictionary unless a word blocks the story.
2. Three times a week, 10 minutes of speed practice on very easy text, such as a chapter you have already read once. Use a paced reader starting at 100 WPM and raise the speed by 25 WPM only when you can retell each paragraph. Drop 50 WPM if you lose the thread twice.
3. Twice a week, 15 minutes of vocabulary work on the words that keep stopping you, with spaced flashcards or a vocabulary notebook.
4. Once a month, a speed check. Time yourself on a new page at your level and divide words by minutes. Expect slow, steady change rather than jumps.

Reading aloud or hearing words in your head is normal at this stage and not something to fight; see subvocalization for why. For building a regular reading habit, read how to read more books, and for the full list of reader settings see how Tachi works.