What I'm going to say may be a little bit counter-intuitive. And I'm ready to take attacks. I learn this personally from the painful experience of my English study. Believe it or not? It's all up to you.
Let's get straight to the point. If you are a beginner of a foreign language, keep your mouth shut until you have listened enough. To paraphrase my point: Do NOT try to speak in your target language until you have become a good listener of that language. Take Japanese study as an example: Do NOT speak Japanese until you can understand more than 50% of the conversations between native speakers.
I say the same thing in three different ways because I think it is very important for beginners of languages. I wish someone had told me this years ago so that I wouldn't have had to spend so much time to unlearn my bad pronunciation and funny accent. Before telling me that you disagree, please let me explain to you in details:
1. If you cannot tell the difference between "correct" and "collect", there is no way you can pronounce them correctly.
This is the very truth of language learning: listening always comes before speaking. You can pronounce a word if and only if you have listened to its pronunciation properly. And the opposite is also true. If you have not listened to the pronunciation of a word properly, the chance for you to pronounce it correctly is close to zero.
If you are not a good listener of your target language, shut your mouth. I know you will somehow become a "fluent" speaker if you keep speaking. But you will at the same time develop and reinforce a bad accent that is very difficult to unlearn later. Life is short. Spend your time on intensive listening first.
2. Bad pronunciation will seriously affect your listening skill.
The reason why I'm so opposed to developing a bad accent is that it'll make it very difficult for you to understand conversations outside the classroom. If you pronounce "correct" as "collect", chances are when people say the word "correct", you'll think that it's a new word you haven't learned. I bet you also have this experience: you watch a movie or listen to a news broadcast and don't understand more than 10%, but when you take a look at the script or the original news story in writing, you would say "Wow! The text is so easy. Why couldn't I understand it when I was listening?" If you have said the same "Wow!" before, it is very likely (actually I'm 100% sure) that your pronunciation sxxks. There are just too many differences between native speakers' pronunciation and yours. So even when you are listening to words that you've learned, they can't match the data stored in your brain, making you wrongly think that they are new words.
If you don't want to develop a habit that will affect your listening, keep your mouth shut and listen more.
3. You will misestimate yourself.
As I have mentioned in other articles, people usually do not correct you if you make mistakes in every sentence you speak. They just don't have the time. Or should I say "they give up on you"? To be polite, your listeners will nod their heads and keep smiling to pretend that the conversation is going on smoothly. And you will think that your effort as a language learner pays off.
Let me tell you the sad truth: It is the Emperor's New Clothes in real life and you are the emperor. And the sadder truth is waiting for you. One day someone will tell you that your pronunciation is funny. You will get hurt and lose the confidence, maybe considering giving up the study altogether. You first overestimate and then underestimate yourself, without focusing on the real problem, that is, your bad pronunciation and bad listening skill.
4. It's against Mother Nature.
When I was learning English as a teenager, my teachers and parents always encouraged me to open my mouth and speak English. Their argument was that as long as people could understand me, it would be okay even if my pronunciation was not perfect. I felt very uncomfortable about it and did not know why. But now more than ten years have passed, I may have some explanations.
It is because speaking without enough listening is against the Nature. Every native speaker of every language in the world spends on average 2 years listening to people around them before uttering the first word. That's how people acquire their first language. That's how you learn your mother tongue. So even when you have the best teachers (your parents, who presumably are native speakers), the best study schedule (24/7), the best mindset (no influence from another language) and the best environment (you study the language and the culture at the same time), you still need to spend two years on pure listening, what makes you think that you can skip those two years when you are studying a foreign language in a much worse environment with a stubborn mindset?
Yes, babies can't pronounce properly most of the time. That's because they don't have teeth and can't control their tongues properly. But they have already stored enough good pronunciation in their brains. Once their tongues and teeth are ready, they will be ‘triggered”to talk so much that you want them to shut up. Your case is the total opposite. Your teeth and tongue are ready. But your brain is empty.
5. Reading will further reinforce your bad pronunciation and affect your listening.
I don’t know if it is a common phenomenon or just me, but when I read, I always pronounce the sentences word by word in my heart. And from my experience, when I read aloud in my heart years ago, I always used the bad pronunciation. And this is really a serious problem.
It’s because the more you read, the more you will use and thus reinforce the bad pronunciation. And I can tell you that this reinforcement will burn into your brain that it is extremely difficult to erase. If you are a heavy reader, then your listening will surely be affected too because you are more exposed to bad pronunciation than native pronunciation. You have literally created a trap and throw yourself into it.
If you have shut your mouth in the first place, then you would not have been influenced by the bad pronunciation because it doesn’t even exist. If the native pronunciation is the only version you have stored in your brain, then you’ll surely use it when you are reading out loud in your heart. Please try to keep the data in your brain pure and free of virus.
By the way, if you attend classes and your teachers have a tendency to ask your classmates to read out loud, cover your ears when they are speaking. Don’t let their bad pronunciation get into your brain. Honestly, although I always tell people that I self-studied Japanese all the way to JLPT level 1, I have actually attended a course for two lessons only. I quit because whenever the native Japanese teacher read a sentence, she asked the whole class, including me, to read that sentence one by one, and there were altogether 20 students! So for every correct pronunciation I heard, I also heard 20 more incorrect ones. And I had to pay for that. Would you quit if you were me?
P.S.
I do NOT mean that you should never open your mouth when learning a foreign language. My point is that you MUST listen enough before speaking. Of course, you can try to pronounce different words from time to time when you think you have enough listening. You are strongly recommended to record your pronunciation and compare it with that of native speakers. Buy a mic if you don’t have any. A good way to check your pronunciation is to talk to monolingual native speakers who are not accustomed to foreign accents. If they frown at you, keep saying yes, say the apple is yummy when you ask them about the weather or deliberately slow down their speech, the red flag is raised and you know you need to shut up and listen more. Another method to check whether you have really listened enough is that (it’s my personal experience) you should dream in your target language when you have given your ears enough training. Try it. It’s really fun.