Why does premature reading cripple phonetic awareness?
Native speakers absorb language subconsciously through constant exposure, whereas non-native learners often rely on reading and analyzing sentences when acquiring their target language. Premature reading can interfere with developing a native-like understanding of the language, and it can harm phonetic awareness and negatively affect your pronunciation. This article explores how premature reading can limit your ability to internalize phonetics, and why balancing listening and reading is crucial for mastering any language.
The Impact of Reading on Perception
Native speakers process language on a subconscious level, so it's only logical that the best way to learn a language is through immersion. When people read, they inevitably analyze the language. They can go at their own pace, taking time to process and think about every word. Consequently, when you learn through reading, you engage entirely different parts of your brain compared to those of native speakers. Essentially, you end up learning not the language itself, but rather how to translate it into your own mental model, a sort of mathematical formula defined by words and grammatical rules. Once your brain gets used to understanding language through this analytical lens, there's no going back. It's hard to revert to the natural intuitive processing that native speakers use. At best, you might be able to train yourself to a point where it becomes automatic, but the experience will still differ from the natural perception of a native speaker who learns to read years after acquiring the language.
How Spoken and Written Language Differ
Consider, for example, how things are said in English. In casual speech, natives often use contractions or altered forms that aren't reflected in their writing. For instance, instead of saying "let me," they might say "lemme". "Going to" often becomes "gonna", and "want to" might sound like "wanna." In writing, native speakers make mistakes that no second-language speaker would make, such as writing "their" instead of "they're" because they sound alike.
When natives speak, their speech flows continuously with no clear boundaries between words. There's no telling where one word ends and another word starts. Everything is connected. In contrast, second-language speakers, who rely on reading to learn a language, perceive the language through its written form, and it influences how they hear and speak it. When they listen to spoken language, their brains map what they hear to an internal text-like representation. Consequently, when they speak, their output tends to be segmented, word-by-word, with noticeable pauses between words.
These examples illustrate how native pronunciation diverges significantly from the written language because natives process language differently. Therefore, early reading can shape your perception of language in ways that prevent you from hearing, speaking, and thinking naturally.
The Impact of Reading on Pronunciation
Reading, along with the use of text-based flashcards and dictionaries, leads to subvocalization. In other words, the act of reading activates the muscles in your throat. If you have not yet developed a solid, intuitive understanding of the phonetics of your target language (TL) through listening, your subvocalization during reading will be incorrect and foreign. This is akin to deliberately practicing poor pronunciation. Premature reading fosters bad pronunciation habits and negatively influences how you perceive spoken language. Undoing these habits later is much more challenging than avoiding them in the first place. It may take thousands of hours of listening practice, pronunciation training, and extensive study of phonetics and pitch accent.
Prioritizing Listening Over Reading
At the start of your AJATT journey, focus more on listening than reading. Passive listening also counts toward your total listening hours. When you immerse with voiced text, like watching movies and TV shows with TL subtitles, it counts as reading practice.
While reading might be difficult at first, it's not too hard to get good, and it's never too late to start. However, mastering listening and speaking is much harder. If your reading skills outpace your listening skills, your brain will become reading-dominant, which is nearly irreversible. It cripples you almost permanently.
That said, relying solely on listening is more challenging and takes longer to achieve fluency. You have to rely entirely on sound to understand meaning. And this approach is nearly impossible to sell to beginners who often feel discouraged when they don't understand anything during immersion. Therefore, in AJATT, we must find a balance between listening and reading. Reading can accelerate language acquisition and achieving literacy. However, relying too much on reading will negatively impact your pitch accent and speaking skills.
The most challenging decision you'll face is finding the right balance between listening and reading. For most learners, we recommend starting with media like anime and avoiding reading at first. Use text-based flashcards and dictionaries to learn sentences you hear while watching. Limit reading to only flashcards and dictionary lookups. Once you've built a solid foundation, you can gradually add reading materials like manga and novels. While some negative effects from reading are unavoidable, they can be minimized through pronunciation training and studying phonetics and pitch accent.
Final Thoughts
When you're just starting out with a new language, reading will have negative long-term effects on your perception and pronunciation in that language.
- The impact on perception affects the language flow, or how quickly and effortlessly you can construct sentences in your head compared to native speakers.
- The impact on pronunciation affects how you sound and how your pronunciation differs from that of native speakers. When learners rely heavily on written text before fully internalizing the language's sound system, they develop bad pronunciation.
If you're learning your target language primarily to enjoy content, such as reading light novels or watching anime, and you don't plan to live in a country where the language is spoken or speak with native speakers, you don't need to worry too much about your accent or the balance between listening and reading. In this case, feel free to immerse in any content you enjoy.
However, if you aim for perfect pronunciation, consider delaying reading until you can understand the TL through sound alone. This approach can help you develop a more native-like linguistic intuition.