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.
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.