I find that I often have to read aloud to comprehend a text, like a little kid. Is this normal?
Does it ever stop?
I wonder if it’s because there are no spaces between the words.
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I definitely sometimes catch myself just sounding out a text in my head without actually attempting to comprehend it. Reading it aloud can help me pay attention. Plus, it’s useful for speaking practice of a sort, too.
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I also often read aloud (I had to do it when learning Spanish - though I can read in my head more for that than with Japanese - so I think it gets better). I find reading aloud helps with focus, and it makes it more fun. I can also recommend a glass of something nice with the good book you’re reading (and then you feel less self-conscious about the reading aloud 
).
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I think it’s very good practice (except on buses).
It helps a lot with speaking because you get to engage your brain and mouth in making and checking the sounds and then hearing them is extra engagement for learning new words. I found it easier to read silently after a while but when by myself, I try to read out loud.
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I do this because the kanji-text-kana-sounds link isn’t fully developed for me and it still is done for the new vocab words. Saying the the word sometimes pushes the memory enough over the edge to where I remember the meaning. There are some texts where I have enough skill to more or less read it in my head but I think it will still happen for a while.
I do feel a bit stupid and self conscious when reading the texts. Like OMG what kind of goofy sounds am I saying…but its a different language and technically all languages have these strange sounds. I’m just used to my own languages [Eng, Spn].
But yeah, reading out loud is required until theres enough skill to stop sounding things out loud. I think its perfectly normal and its also perfectly normal to feel somewhat goofy and just something to get over because this will become your language with enough time.
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I think it’s pretty normal for some learners. I do it too, not necessarily need it to understand but it help with readings recall speed.
As a benchmark I find that you stutter on reading you do not recall quick enough so it’s a good way to find those that needs practice.
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I don’t need to read aloud so much with French as with Japanese, though I am about equally bad in both languages. I suspect that so many French words look similar to their English cognates, that that makes it easier.
I think that was similar in German, I didn’t need to read aloud to comprehend, though that was nearly 50 years ago, so maybe I forgot. But I do remember reading the German translation of the entire Lord of the Rings to my boyfriend at the time in order to practice pronunciation.
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I do this too sometimes. I think it will stop later on.
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nothing wrong with reading aloud when you’re just reading to learn etc imho. i do it a lot (especially for news articles)
apart from anything else it helps to associate kanji with the actual sound of a given word (and vice versa)
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Reading out loud is great! We do it for little kids because they (can’t read but also they) are seeing and hearing the words at the same time. Double the learning! I usually read out loud to myself when I am tired, otherwise I end up reading the same sentence over an over again.
Also I feel like it might help with speaking…specifically with pronunciation. (This is just a guess, tho)
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‘Shadowing’ is a thing these days, as a method to not only get good pronunciation but also to try to match native Japanese pitch accent. (You can search more about ‘shadowing’ in this forum, on Youtube or on the internet.) It’s different to just reading aloud - it can be done with or without reading; I mention it here as a related topic.
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I read aloud for Japanese too! My listening/speaking is better than my reading/writing, so reading aloud helps me understand faster and forces me to look up the reading when I forget it 
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Oh this reminded me of something I used to do when I had to quickly finish a book for English literature classes. I would listen to the audio book while I read the book in front of me. When I was exhausted, and wasn’t comprehending anything I would do this and it was so helpful. I have never tried it for language learning, but I think it would be interesting. I don’t know why shadowing made me think of that.
Also, I agree! Shadowing is a very, very useful self-study tool. Tons of linguistic research backing it up.
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Imagining the voice of every syllables helps for me to see word boundaries and phrase variations too. It also helps to imagine a proper person making that voice (narrator? guy? country folk?) or just get a role model to imagine into (Japanese person of the same gender that feels like yourself). Make voice out loud helps with better focus and also, wishfully, better comprehension.
Actually I don’t do that much with English, just visual representation of vocabularies, and gross view of sentence structure. (Despite no Kanji. Maybe it’s indeed about lack of spaces and also arbitrary line breaks into words.)
My native language is Thai, rarely any spaces, but I also don’t make voice for that. My language doesn’t break words between lines anyway.
Without voice, reading doesn’t have to be sequential, but maybe also less proper grammar parsing, but rather more on key dots. But without voice, sometimes I replace with another more-or-less similar words, just to proceed with the sentence.
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Helps me focus on the rhythm of the text in my head. Especially in books.
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I didn’t start reading aloud until I had to do ondoku in class. I find it helps me concentrate. The only problem is that if I read at a cafe, I get self-conscious because I’m making noise and I have an accent. Sometimes a salaryman will be sitting next to me while I’m reading aloud and I wonder to myself, “Does he think I’m some weirdo reading these corny textbooks and stuff out loud??”
But it does help to figure out where word boundaries are!
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absolutely, but sometimes I do it in other languages too 
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Maybe you’re right about that! In my first encounter with Japanese (about 40 years ago, yikes!), I was just trying to translate written stuff into English or German*, which resulted in me knowing the general meaning of various kanji, but often not the reading.
Even now, 40 years after that initial foray, I consistently get meanings correct in WK more often than readings.
———
*Back in the day, before the internet or electronic dictionaries, looking up words as a learner was very tedious. First, you needed a character dictionary, requiring the identification of the (official) “lead” radical (left, top or surrounding) and a lot of stroke counting. If you were looking up a compound word, you would be hoping that your character dictionary (“Nelson”), would actually include your compound under the first kanji. But that only happened for the really common compounds. Lacking such an entry, you had to determine ALL of the possible on’yomis of each of the kanjis in the compound and then start looking up all the theoretically possible reading combinations in a romaji Japanese-English (like “Kenkyusha”), until you found a hit. After finding the meaning, I was often too tired or stressed to note or remember the reading…
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That sounds like a nightmare.
It was a nightmare, at least in retrospect now that things have gotten easier.
I just had pages and pages of noted vocabulary, as there was no reasonable way to do SRS either.
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