I’ve already talked about how I love listening to books rather than reading them because it’s just easier for me. When I listen to books I usually have it on a faster speed just because I’m so used to listening to books that I can listen to them at a higher speed. I don’t reallynotice that I’m listening to them really fast, but others have asked me how I can understand what the book is saying when it’s going so fast. I guess it’s the same thing as people’s reading speed. Some people can read really fast and some not so much (I can’t read very fast). If I’m paying attention to what I’m listening too I can listen to things at twice the speed (which is helpful when one of my school books is 35 hours long).
Tag Archives: Reading
Devices and ways of help with reading
Characters in Books who are Blind
One thing I like doing in my writing is adding people with disabilities. Especially people who can’t see and showing that they can do a lot of things that other people can in a different way. I don’t feel like it’s expressed very well in media and a lot of people don’t know much about it. I like it when people try to add things like that into their story because it feels nice to know that people are thinking about things and trying them out though sometimes it can get a bit frustrating with hose some people pertray people with disabilities. Or even just badly characterize someone. In a story I read once which was a fanfiction story based on a show I watched someone got on my nerves bout that. There is a character in the show who has white hair (though since this is anime and the main character has hair that’s three colours I wouldn’t really say anything about a white haired character).. His eye colour is different, but that’s besides the point. The person said he was albino which would be fine if they knew anything about albino people. At the time I had a few friends who were albino so I wouldn’t have called myself an expert, but I knew a little bit about them. Given the character had dark brown eyes and no issue going out in the sun or seeing it was just an animation choice to give him white hair. I brought it up with the author who said that they just used it as a way to describe the character which got me more upset than I already was. I decided not to push the issue any further, but it was frustrating. It was only one time and there are plenty of times where I’ve seen characters with disabilities done really well and it always makes me happy to see people take the time to look up or ask someone about how to do a character with a disability instead of just doing it. I don’t want to sound negative about things, but that’s just something that stuck with me. I’ve seen one story where a character (ironically and albino) was in the story and it turned out really well and I loved the story as a whole. In my own writing though I like to have visually impaired or blind characters to show that we can be as strong as anyone else. In my novel I’m working on one of my main characters is blind and I love her to death!
Well that was… long
So I e-mailed my teachers during the summer to say hello and to get the reading lists so that I could at least to a certain extent be ahead of the game when it came to reading. I got most of the books, and most of them are a decent length, but one of them is over 800 words. What does that mean? 35 hours of listening to one book! It was a decent book at least, but still! I listen to books fast (in fact people wonder how I could listen that fast and understand, but I do actually) so it wasn’t as long as it could have been, but even if I did listen to it twice as fast as normal that’s still 17-18 hours of listening. I can just imagine how long that would take me to actually read if that was on paper. One time I took a reading test to see how fast I read and it was only about 100 words per minute. I think that does depend on the size of the print, but it’s not the best (which was an interesting thing when I was trying to help my mom study for her dog show test to see if she could judge dogs as we drove over to New York. I had to read the papers out to her, and sometimes I stumbled over my words, but it all worked out so yay! ) Actually that’s a thing about y reading. Because I have to look at each words sometimes it’s hard for me to tell where a sentence starts and ends so really it’s just a lot easier to listen to books. Even so that took a long time. I’m going to have to do it over again, but still, it certainly wasn’t an easy task.
Kindle can read books! Yay!
One thing I’ve found out recently is that Kindle actually does have the ability to read books to you. While looking for books for my next year of college my mom and I were trying to figure out the best way for me to maximize my efficiency when it came to reading books. As a combined English and Creative Writing major writing and reading are a big part of the deal. Of course with a lot of reading there raises a dilemma, reading books takes way too long and sometimes I have no idea even what I’m reading. Listening to books is a lot of fun, but sometimes it’s hard to get direct quotes for essays. There were a few ways we tried to get by this, and they were met with moderate degrees of success. So we thought about a kindle because you can see the text as you’re reading it. The thing is we didn’t know if they had an audio function. So a bit of searching around revealed that in most cases the answer would be “no”, but some more searching came up with a bundle specially made for visually impaired and blind people that allows you to listen to the books. Which is great! So now I can listen and look at my book at the same time! Yay!
Victor Reader Streams are very helpful
A piece of technology I like using are Victor Reader Streams for Mumanware. They are small and portable (which is a vast improvement from things I’ve had in the past. Technology really has been getting smaller for the better). I’d recommend it for many different things. Itps practical for many different uses. from recording notes, to listening to stories from Audible, Learning Ally, and other things to even being able to put your own written documents on it. It makes listening to stories on the go really fast and easy, and if you’re a writer like me you can even listen to your own stories (if you don’t mind the-sometimes highly amusing-butchering of names that aren’t English).
I use mine for various purposes. I have some SD cards where I have stories I’ve written or fun stories I want to listen to on my free time. Then I have a number of SD cards that I use to record notes from lectures and read the books I need for class.
One thing I will warn about notes is that you can’t rename them. It will not recognize them unless they have a specific name. So my suggestion would be having more than one card for different classes to make them easier to go through.
The navigation isn’t too hard to figure out, and you can navigate it rather fast. There are also ways to change the speed and pitch of the voice if needed. It’s a very useful tool for anyone who needs to listen to books, things they’ve written and record notes all in one. It also has various differnet language functions as well so it can help visually impaired peole from theor countries.