I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.
Most people, when learning to read, don’t care about pronunciation at all. Like why would they? Here is the word. Who cares how it is pronounced if you see it clearly and know its meaning?
Do you not hear the words in your head while reading?
Sometimes I do. But it doesn’t help me or stop me from understanding the word. Completely irrelevant parallel process. Especially in English. In my native language we have a strict bijection between letters and sounds, so pronunciation is trivial.
When English-speaking kids are taught to read, and to spell, it’s very much an out-loud process, using phonics, and methodically covers the various pronunciation of all the letters’ sounds. “Sound it out” is the first step in decoding written words. Then of course there’s using context clues to figure out what word you’ve heard before could be spelled using those letters’ possible sounds. And it’s not until later, once all the common rules and exceptions of pronunciation are automatic, that you start “reading to learn” and attempt words you’ve never heard before.
I talk about how grown-up people study a foreign language.
Most adults I know who study a foreign language do so in order to speak it, perhaps visit that country. In languages that build words from letters, the phonemes are important to meaning. Obviously “heresy” is very different from “hearsay,” but sow and sow are different words that sound different, while sew and so are also different but sound the same. It’s especially important in order to appreciate literature, poetry, music, and jokes.