Why does premature reading cripple phonetic awareness?

Reading, along with using text-based flashcards and dictionaries, leads to sub-vocalization. In other words, the act of reading activates the muscles in your throat. If you haven't developed a solid intuitive understanding of the phonetics of your target language through listening, your subvocalization while reading will be incorrect and foreign. This is akin to deliberately practicing poor pronunciation. Reading forms bad pronunciation habits and negatively influences how you perceive spoken language. Undoing these habits later is more difficult than avoiding them in the beginning, requiring thousands of hours of listening, training pronunciation, and studying phonetics and pitch accent.

In the beginning, I recommend dedicating more time to listening than to reading. Passive listening also adds up to the total hours. If the text is voiced, such as anime with subtitles, it counts towards reading practice unless you do not read along.

Reading may be a challenge at first, but getting good at reading is not that hard, and it's never late to start reading. Getting perfect at listening and speaking is much harder. If your reading gets too good and your listening lags too far behind, your brain will start to become too reading-dominant. This imbalance is hard to reverse later. It cripples you almost permanently.

However, it's more difficult and takes longer to learn through listening alone. You have to rely on nothing but sound to understand what's going on. This approach is impossible to sell to beginners who feel discouraged when they understand nothing during immersion. As a result, in AJATT, we must find a compromise between listening and reading. By utilizing the power of reading, we can progress more quickly in acquiring the language and achieving literacy, but we also harm our pitch accent and speaking skills.

The toughest decision you will face is determining the right balance between listening and reading. For most learners, we recommend avoiding reading at first and primarily immersing in anime while using text-based flashcards and dictionaries to learn sentences you hear while watching. Once you have established a solid foundation, you can begin reading manga and novels, gradually increasing the amount of reading. While there will be negative effects from reading, they can be managed through pronunciation training and studying phonetics and pitch accent.

People learning Japanese solely for the purpose of consuming content, such as reading ranobe or watching anime, and who do not plan to live in Japan and talk to natives, should not be overly concerned about their accent or the balance between listening and reading.

Tags: faq