The conclusion is extreme. Reading is too much of a benefit in language learning to give up on at all, it's the best source of the widest range of comprehensible native input you're going to find.
I learned my second language by reading out loud, and only going on if I was sure I was pronouncing the thing right. We have the internet now; if you think you're pronouncing something wrong in a common language, you can go on the internet and make sure you're pronouncing it right. [edit: I remember when people were using their phones to transcribe what they were saying in L2 in order to check their pronunciation; do people still do that?]
When reading out loud sometimes I would sing the words, because you can't come up with a convincing way to sing a sentence unless you understand what it means.
Orthography is of course going to be distracting in English or French (or Chinese) because they have terrible orthography when it comes to representing sounds. But you're going to want to be literate anyway, so eventually you're going to have to learn how to recognize but ignore the details of the words.
Subtitles are a problem because people shut their ears off while reading them (as the article claims to confirm.) But if you can understand the subtitles, you've improved your literacy and gained an understanding of that piece of media. Now turn them off, and listen while knowing what's being said. Shadow and repeat after the speakers. Check your pronunciation against them. Roll the words in your mouth while the meaning is rolling around in your head. Make sure you know and can repeat every word that's being said, and make sure you understand the grammar.
Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all very different things. But I'm not just learning a language to speak to people, so every one if them is important. I will not understand the cultural references that people use in daily conversation to communicate meaning unless I read. I can't replace their entire upbringing in a language by chatting, even in a focused way, for a few years.
Learning a language as an adult is different than learning a language as a baby. As an adult, you have another language to compare everything to, and you already know how languages work. A baby will become extremely fluent in their first language before they ever learn to read. You already know how to read. Take advantage. If you want to work on your pronunciation, there are lots of ways, like chorusing, shadowing, reading out loud, Pimsleur and FSI give you lots of chances to compare your pronunciation to a model, etc.
Babies take 7-8 years to get good at a language. They're no faster than you.
My problem is how to overcome the translating in your head to being able to think in a language even simple things.
I was in Costa Rica and while all of the customer facing people spoke English, one guy who brought us water asked a simple question “desayuno o cena?” After thinking about it for a couple of seconds, I realized he was asking whether we wanted the breakfast or dinner menu. Even the Spanish I do know, it takes me way too long to understand it and speak it.
The only guaranteed way of avoiding translation in your head that I know of, is to in fact never translate. Learn the bare minimum to get somewhere to start from, and get comprehensible input from there on. Something which you enjoy, something which fascinates you, and if it's a story, something which can get your mind images going, and this is where reading works. Something which can make you forget that it's actually words on a page, you're barely aware of that. That's when the mind starts to figure out things subconsciously. The problem is finding the input.
Incidentally the above is exactly how I learned English. I didn't try to learn English, I just wanted to read the computer magazine or the fiction or whatever I was able to digest at the time.
The side effect is that you'll be horrible at translation.. there's no connection to the same association.
I learned my second language by reading out loud, and only going on if I was sure I was pronouncing the thing right. We have the internet now; if you think you're pronouncing something wrong in a common language, you can go on the internet and make sure you're pronouncing it right. [edit: I remember when people were using their phones to transcribe what they were saying in L2 in order to check their pronunciation; do people still do that?]
When reading out loud sometimes I would sing the words, because you can't come up with a convincing way to sing a sentence unless you understand what it means.
Orthography is of course going to be distracting in English or French (or Chinese) because they have terrible orthography when it comes to representing sounds. But you're going to want to be literate anyway, so eventually you're going to have to learn how to recognize but ignore the details of the words.
Subtitles are a problem because people shut their ears off while reading them (as the article claims to confirm.) But if you can understand the subtitles, you've improved your literacy and gained an understanding of that piece of media. Now turn them off, and listen while knowing what's being said. Shadow and repeat after the speakers. Check your pronunciation against them. Roll the words in your mouth while the meaning is rolling around in your head. Make sure you know and can repeat every word that's being said, and make sure you understand the grammar.
Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are all very different things. But I'm not just learning a language to speak to people, so every one if them is important. I will not understand the cultural references that people use in daily conversation to communicate meaning unless I read. I can't replace their entire upbringing in a language by chatting, even in a focused way, for a few years.
Learning a language as an adult is different than learning a language as a baby. As an adult, you have another language to compare everything to, and you already know how languages work. A baby will become extremely fluent in their first language before they ever learn to read. You already know how to read. Take advantage. If you want to work on your pronunciation, there are lots of ways, like chorusing, shadowing, reading out loud, Pimsleur and FSI give you lots of chances to compare your pronunciation to a model, etc.
Babies take 7-8 years to get good at a language. They're no faster than you.