Reading Speed

Choose a text of your liking, or download one of the four practice texts (in German) here and print it out.

Once you have the text in front of you and are ready to start the test, set a timer (on your cell phone, for example) for one minute and press “Start.” Now you have one minute to read the text as fast as you can. As soon as the alarm sounds and the time is up, stop reading and mark how far you got.

Reading speed is measured in words per minute. In our prepared text, the words are already counted by lines.

Up to 200 words a minute: Your reading pace is very slow. You might have become accustomed to reading aloud softly as you read, because your pace is not much faster than the speed of reading aloud. If you have to read a lot, you definitely have a hard time getting it all done.

200 to 500 words a minute: You’re a highly practiced reader! You no longer read word by word. Instead, you manage to fly through some passages of text. However, you can learn to read even faster by honing your sense of what is important and unimportant and paying attention to the structure of a text.

More than 500 words a minute: Bravo! You read at an above-average pace! You read a lot and have developed a keen sense of the essentials. But there’s always room for improvement, even in your case.

Now enter your starting score in the reading speed scale, which you can download and print below: