Re: Can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

I've discovered that when I read Japanese aloud my comprehension
drops precipitously.

Reading Japanese texts out loud is one of the most useful techniques I
have used for studying Japanese. No, it's not easy, and as Ben
commented, a big part of fluency is familiarity, so I used to read the
same passage about 6~10 times, or however long it took me to get
comfortable with.

Of course, you could argue that I was "remembering" as much as I was
"reading", but this doesn't really bother me. My reading speed
improved dramatically, new words "stuck" in my head more effectively,
and the sentence patterns/structures in the text slid down somewhere
into the depths of my subconscious, making it easier to intuitively
understand progressively more and more complex material.

Worked for me anyway.

.