Looking for a fun and engaging community to help your touch typing questions?

The touch typing community is vast and growing, but there’s no company that handles it better than Typesy.

Typesy Community allows like-minded typists to get together in a new immersive experience. They can raise their touch typing-related queries and bond with one another. It allows for interaction between both the company and the user – updates, know-hows – and users with each other.

Typesy Community is for all types of people and it has its benefits for each.

Students will benefit from Typesy Community as this feature will allow them to learn through inquiry and clarify ideas presented by lessons in a quick and brisk manner. Typesy Community also allows students to explore its vast number of visual aids to advance their learning.

Teachers who use Typesy will also be able to further add to their interpretation through Typesy Community. They will be able to have an exchange of thoughts with a panel of touch typing experts in the company.

Typesy’s main goal, however, has always been on the learning. May you be a student, teacher, or whoever else, Typesy Community is an added feature to your learning experience – to help you type quickly and accurately with a wide range of assistance from experts of the craft to amateurs, too!

If your type is learning, then come visit Typesy Community at http://community.typesy.com/.

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All of the knowledge you’ve gained from your reading and study remains in your brain, even though you might not keep those facts in your consciousness at all time. In many ways your brain is like a huge database, with millions of stored ideas and details and answers that wait to be retrieved or recalled when they’re needed. This recall doesn’t have to be like a computer command, though. One mistake people make while reading is thinking that they have to stop and make a specific and deliberate “request” to themselves to remember a word or its meaning, and this slows down their reading speed – or brings it to a complete stop.

Learning how to read through unfamiliar words is a skill that will help you to increase your reading speed. Many people think that in order to understand the meaning of a sentence, they need to know the exact definition of every word. In many cases, though, your comprehension of what the author is trying to communicate will not be greatly affected by the use of unfamiliar words, if the context of the phrase makes the overall sense of the sentences clear. Here’s an example:

Julianna ate a large spoonful of the porkolt and immediately reached for a glass of water. The dish was so fuszeres that her tongue felt scorched and drops of sweat rolled down her face.

Now, unless you speak Hungarian, there were at least two words in that passage that you didn’t know. However, you probably had a mental image of the scene, and perhaps a memory of being in the same situation, when you’d accidentally eaten something that was extremely hot or spicy. You didn’t need to know that porkolt is the word for “stew” and fuszeres means “spicy.” In fact, it could have just meant “hot” (as in temperature) and the sense of the passage would have been the same.

Your brain works behind the scenes, as it were, to fill in the missing meanings with information you have stored in your mental database. This allows you to skim over what you might think of as potholes in your personal information highway, so you don’t have to stop and fill each of them in in order to make progress.

Remember, the more you add to your personal database, the better able your brain will be in filling in these gaps as you read, and the faster your reading speed will increase. Read as much as you can, on a wide range of topics, and your stored knowledge will support you in your speed-reading goals.

People love June because it’s the end of school and the official start of summer, which can only mean one thing: fun!

To honor June, here are some little-known facts about June. Share them with your friends at the next pool party!

Named after the goddess of marriage

The sixth month of the year took its name from Juno, the goddess of marriage. Maybe that’s why so many people choose to tie the knot in June? No matter how the tradition got started, June remains the most popular wedding month.

Pearl, moonstone and alexandrite

These birthstones for June all represent positive values. Alexandrite symbolizes good health and longevity. Moonstones are all about new beginnings. Pearls, a timeless symbol of class and prestige, signify health and purity.

The zodiac in June

If you’ve got friends born between June 1st and June 20th they fall under the sign of Gemini. Those born in the last ten days of June have the zodiac sign of Cancer. Geminis are typically indecisive, witty, and energetic, while those under the sign of Cancer are known for being loyal, oversensitive, and adaptable.

Birth flowers for June

The timeless rose and the sweet honeysuckle are the birth flowers of June. Roses can signify a number of things, including gratitude, romantic love and innocence, depending on their color. Honeysuckle’s meaning is more clear, representing fidelity, generosity, and love.

Celebrations in June

In June we’ve got plenty of things to celebrate and commemorate. We celebrate dads on Father’s Day every June. And each June 6th we remember the politically and historically important “D Day” that marks the Normandy landings of the Allies during World War II.

June 21st is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. In fact, June has the most days with the longest daylight hours of any month. One more reason to spend more time outdoors in June!

Why do we have a leap year every four years in the first place?

To answer this question we need to go a few hundred years back. For the sun to make a full circle around our planet it takes 365 days plus a little more – about five to six hours.

But as you already know, the Gregorian Calendar (the calendar used by most countries as a calendar system) only contains 365 days spread out over 12 months. So what happens to that one-third of an hour?

You’re already figuring it out, I can tell. It takes three years for this 0.24 of a day to make up a whole day. We add an extra day to February every fourth year to make up for this discrepancy.

Why does it matter?

Calendars have one goal: to ensure people can properly understand and predict the seasons and the weather. If we were to omit adding one day every four years, eventually the seasons would not be in sync with our calendars.

On paper it would say May, but in terms of seasonal temperatures, it might feel like August or December, depending on how out of synch it was that year. Imagine the chaos!

If you’re a bit of a history nerd you’ll love this. Back in the days of the Roman Empire the calendar had only 355 days. To account for those extra days that the sun needed to complete its orbit, the Romans use to add a whole month – yes, a whole month – to their calendars every two years.

But when Julius Caesar became emperor of Rome in the 1st century AD, he decided that he wanted a more straightforward system. That’s when Sosigenes, the astronomer Caesar employed, created the Julian calendar, with 365 days in normal years and 366 days every fourth year.

But wait – we don’t use the Julian calendar today!

That’s because for some people, even this Julian adjustment wasn’t enough. About five hundred years later, the Gregorian calendar was created to account for a much smaller (0.002%) discrepancy.

It was a change driven by the needs of the Roman Catholic Church, which decreed that the Easter celebrations were to be held on or close to the spring equinox (end of March).

After five centuries of observing the Julian Calendar, Easter was getting farther and farther from the spring equinox, something the Church was not happy with. That’s why Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian Calendar. It was first adopted by Catholic countries in Europe, and eventually by most countries around the world, as a way to make international trade and communication more convenient.

Why the extra day is added to February and not another month?

This is a question many people have. Today, every other month has 30 or 31 days – but this was not always the case.

When Julius Caesar was emperor, July – the month named after him – had 31 days and August had 29. When Caesar Augustus succeeded Julius Caesar, he too wanted the month named after him (August) to have more than just 29 days. So he borrowed two days from February.

It’s good to be king! (Or emperor, in this case.)

As you’re reading this line, aren’t you also wondering how it is that you read? What processes go into this complex cognitive skill? How do your brain and eyes collaborate so smoothly that you can understand what I’m saying right now?

There’s no need to creep you out any further. Let’s take a deeper look into what goes into this cognitively outstanding process.

Just a matter of decoding symbols?

So you know what reading is; it’s essentially making sense of symbols strung together to get the meaning.

You’re reading to extract information you can then use to communicate and share further.

But you’re also reading for entertainment, whether it’s a super hero comic, an Internet meme, poetry, or a Booker-prize-awarded novel.

However, what’s so unique about reading is that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The reader has an active role in which – through experiences, knowledge, and sociocultural habitat – the reader shapes the words they read and interprets them, perhaps differently than the next person will read and interpret the same words.

What skills go into reading?

Well, I’m glad you asked! That’s because there are four crucial skills that allow you to read what we’re now saying.

Language Acquisition and the Ability to Read At Sublexical and Lexical Level

Sublexical reading is the process of recognizing what symbols and strings of symbols sound like, just by looking at them. Using phonics to achieve this skill is one way to go about it.

When you master sublexical reading it’s time for lexical reading. In this process, you go beyond what words sound like and move on to what these words signify. In other words, you move from phonological awareness to semantic and pragmatic knowledge of how these symbols work together. Depending on the order and context in which they occur, they can mean or signify different things.

For example, it’s context and pronunciation that help you properly decode this sentence when you hear it and properly interpret “read” as the act of having read in the past and not the color “red”.

“Bill read that his favorite movie is not available in his town.”

In the case below, context helps you know that the word “nail” refers to the hard endings on top of your fingers and toes and not the metallic, thin pieces used mostly in construction projects.

“Her nails were badly bitten because of all the stress she was experiencing while waiting outside the OR.”

Apart from language acquisition, in which reading is both a process to acquire language and improve upon your reading skill, reading also requires a certain level of critical analysis, imagination and creativity.

If you’re reading poetry literally you’re missing the point and might feel perplexed or misled by the time you’re done reading the piece. If you’re reading a technical report, you need to apply critical knowledge in order to interpret the numbers on the paper into actionable advice.

You might not realize it but being able to read is a great human achievement that, along with our ability to write, laid the basis for our civilization’s progress.

7 Speed Reading is designed to be the world’s most powerful speed reading training program. If you want to learn speed reading, 7 Speed Reading is the best option.

Helen Birke

Speed Reading Trick #1: Skim and Scan

Long-form reading is not always important or necessary. You need to be critical in what you choose to read by developing your “skim and scan” habits. Scan the piece of content in front of you for key sections in the main body, and always pay attention to the introduction and conclusion where the main ideas are often recapped. That allows you to skip over anything that isn’t essential to the information you need to get from the text. With 7 Speed Reading™ you’ll learn the techniques that help you quickly locate essential content in all of your documents.

Speed Reading Trick #2: Selective Reading

Any piece of text contains a lot of filler words: words that often facilitate meaning, but aren’t necessarily required to understand the essential details. This means that you don’t truly need to focus on these words to make out the meaning of a sentence. Take the following excerpt from a 7 Speed Reading™article:

“The Winter 2014 semester class going on now focuses on films, poetry, photography, essays and a heavy dose of the mushrooming subgenre of speculative fiction known as climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, novels like ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ by Nathaniel Rich, and ‘Solar,’ by Ian McEwan.”

The highlighted words are the key words that you need to focus on. The rest are descriptive language, conjunctions, and other extra information you don’t really need to read to understand the paragraph’s meaning. There are dozens of professionally-designed exercises in 7 Speed Reading™ that train your eyes to find and focus on the key words in the text.

When you’re reading a longer paragraph, always start by reading the first and last sentence to get the gist of the paragraph. You’d be surprised how much you can learn by reading only these two sentences out of each long paragraph.

Point and Read

If you’re reading on a computer, use your cursor to accelerate the reading pace. If you’re reading a book or journal, try using your index finger to guide your eyes to move faster. This tip helps you to stop yourself from re-reading what you’ve just read, and increases your focus on the text so that you comprehend what you read, even if you’re reading much faster. The accelerated training program in 7 Speed Reading™ uses moving text displays to help you focus on the text in front of you.

Stop the Voices In Your Head

Even if your tongue and mouth don’t move, and even if no noise comes out of your mouth when you’re reading, you might still notice a voice in your head that “reads” what you read. This is called subvocalization and it’s a technique that helps us process what we’re reading when we first learn to read as a child. One way to avoid subvocalization is to read in chunks of words rather than word by word, and 7 Speed Reading™ uses this “chunking” method in many exercises and activities to train your eyes to read word groups. Because your mind cannot process a set of words all at once, you won’t automatically try to sound them out, and that will save you time.

Trust Your Brain

This tip goes along with the “selective reading” hack. Your mind is very good at filling in missing details, and if you’re getting the sense of text from the important words, you don’t have to worry about the rest of the paragraph. In fact, your eyes are actually seeing all of the words, even if you’re only consciously reading a few of them. Trust your eyes and your brain to automatically read and store the rest of the words, and don’t be tempted to re-read text over and over again. The many reading comprehension tests in 7 Speed Reading™ help you develop the confidence you need to be a top speed reader.

Cover the Page

If you can’t get out of the habit of re-reading text, make it impossible to do so. When you’re reading printed material, use a blank piece of paper to cover the text from top to bottom as your read down the page. If you’re reading on line, adjust the display so that the line of text you’re reading is at the absolute top, and then use the cursor key to scroll down line by line as you read. When you practice with 7 Speed Reading™ you’ll see this technique in action during the “Text Highlighter” exercises.

Learn More Words

One big thing that slows down a lot of people is having to stop and look up words, or figure out what a word means. If you have a bigger vocabulary, you’ll be able to read without stopping. To save time, keep a notebook (or on-screen notepad) handy and jot down unfamiliar words as you read, and then make a note of their definitions. Use these notes for vocabulary practice later so you’ll never have to look them up again. And the more you read, the more words you’ll learn, so read as many different types of text as you can. With 7 Speed Reading™ you can easily access and import text documents from almost any source, so you’ll never run out of things to read, and words to learn!

Good reading comprehension is based on having a good vocabulary. Obviously, if the text you’re asked to analyze contains one or more words that you don’t know, you’ll find it harder to accurately discuss the meaning and content of the text. We’ve found a passage from H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” that’s related to vocabulary. Read the text, then answer the questions we’ve provided, which are modeled on questions you’ll encounter in the GRE.

It is improbable that there was ever such a thing as a common human language. We know nothing of the language of Paleolithic man; we do not even know whether Paleolithic man talked freely. We know that Paleolithic man had a keen sense of form and attitude, because of his drawings; and it has been suggested that he communicated his ideas very largely by gesture. Probably such words as the earlier men used were mainly cries of alarm or passion or names for concrete things, and in many cases they were probably imitative sounds made by or associated with the things named. The first languages were probably small collections of such words; they consisted of interjections and nouns. Probably the nouns were said in different intonations to convey different meanings. If Paleolithic man had a word for “horse” or “bear,” he probably showed by tone or gesture whether he meant “bear is coming,” “bear is going,” “bear is to be hunted,” “dead bear,” “bear has been here,” “bear did this,” and so on. Only very slowly did the human mind develop methods of indicating action and relationship in a formal manner. Modern languages contain many thousands of words, but the earlier languages could have consisted only of a few hundred. It is said that even modern European peasants can get along with something less than a thousand words, and it is quite conceivable that so late as the Early Neolithic Period that was the limit of the available vocabulary. Probably men did not indulge in those days in conversation or description. For narrative purposes they danced and acted rather than told. They had no method of counting beyond a method of indicating two by a dual number, and some way of expressing many. The growth of speech was at first a very slow process indeed, and grammatical forms and the expression of abstract ideas may have come very late in human history, perhaps only 400 or 500 generations ago.

Question 1: According to Wells, is a large vocabulary necessary for communication?

Question 2: How does Wells imagine Paleolithic man communicating the difference between the phrases “bear is coming” and “bear is going”?

Question 3: What is the main difference that Wells finds between modern language and the earliest forms of language?

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