> NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound.

Would that I had learned this earlier. Native english speaker, but I grew up reading voraciously from quite a young age. This meant that though I got a big vocabulary and context as to the appropriate uses of a word, I would have difficulty pronouncing them and often come up with something completely wrong. I'd go and look words up in the dictionary, as taught by my parents. Unfortunately, I was not aware of the meaning of the IPA symbols, let alone how to decipher them; they looked to me as foreign script might to another. It was rather amusing for friends and family, but rather humiliating for me.