Comment by 55555

Probably too long of an answer, but: averaged out over the months, I spend 30 minutes every weekday doing flashcards, 45 minutes with a tutor, and spend another 1.25 hours watching TV or reading books in my target language. With 2.5 hours every weekday on average and without life immersion (at your home or office) it's possible to get to reading/writing/speaking/understanding fluency (including in terms of speed) in a difficult language in about 3-4 years and near-native in another 2 years. It's very difficult as an English native to learn a language like Chinese, Japanese, or Thai. It's not like learning Spanish or French (which I have also studied). To answer your question directly, surprisingly, reading a book does very little to help your speaking or understanding abilities. The skills of understanding accents/pronunciations quickly enough and the skill of structuring sentences when speaking quickly enough are completely different skills. Writing/reading/speaking/understanding are four remarkably unrelated skills that must be trained separately. Actually, typing on a keyboard and writing by hand are also different. Because thai actually has a different keyboard on desktop vs phone, since it became good enough, I decided to simply use speech to text for the rest of my life. I'm remarkably fluent in comprehension and have read quite a few adult books and yet if you give me a pencil and paper my brain can't figure out how to spell a word that I can easily say or type. And why use an LLM instead of a tutor? To save $2,700 a year.