How much listening should I do before I start reading?

Essentially, language learners face two primary options. Start practicing reading from the beginning or postpone reading until a future point.

If your sole goal is to understand your target language, be able to read books effortlessly, but you don't care about speaking or interacting with natives, then reading early is a good idea. As an adult, learning foreign languages through reading is considerably easier than learning by listening to spoken language. You can improve much more quickly.

However, reading early on comes with a significant drawback: you're going to develop bad phonetic habits. Reading biases your perception of the language. Without acquiring a solid intuitive understanding of the language's phonetics, the way the language sounds in your head while reading will be incorrect and foreign. Undoing these habits later is harder than avoiding them in the beginning and requires thousands of hours of listening.

Learning through listening alone is more difficult and takes more time. You must rely solely on sound to understand what's going on. Yet, listening practice is precisely what gives you very strong listening abilities. The quality of your pronunciation is also largely determined by your ability to perceive sounds and detect subtle differences.

If you want to develop excellent listening skills and pronunciation, I recommend focusing exclusively on audio-visual input (TV shows, movies, anime, dramas) in the beginning. While it's hard to completely avoid reading because you'll still need to create Anki cards and use dictionaries, minimizing reading will help prevent many bad phonetic habits.

The most optimal approach is to learn to read kana and kanji from the beginning, but avoid active reading practice beyond reviewing text-based flashcards. Your primary focus should be listening all the time and learning to understand spoken language. Do it for the first year. This will give you a strong foundation in the language's phonetics. After this initial period, you can gradually introduce light reading. Start with easy comic books or manga, then progressively move to more difficult content like novels.

Even if you're eager to start reading immediately, never neglect listening. Listening is convenient and easy to do. You can do it while doing something else, in the background.

Tags: faq