I'm curious about how non-native speakers learn to speak well in their countries. Aside from today's technology, they don't have the access to the spoken language. But people living hundreds of years ago could speak in different languages.
Do you find that reading can lead to speaking well?
Reading a lot will among others increase your knowledge of vocabulary and culture. However, it is very difficult to actually learn how to speak by just reading a language. Even if you know how to read phonetic transcriptions, you're bound to make mistakes if you don't actually practice the language and speak it with others. Learning a language and learning how to use it well is complicated and takes a lot of time and practice.
So: Yes, reading will help you improve your skill in and knowledge of a language. No, it will not help you speak a language perfectly. For that you will really need to practice by speaking it yourself and listening to others. So combine reading with listening and speaking. This may even be listening to audio fragments or the radio etc and then repeating what has been said.
Reading alone won't help you much. You have to learn to formulate in written form and find your own formulation exercises. The oftener you formulate ideas about what you are reading the better your skill to formulate will become. And your skill to speak. Reading is something passive, formulating is something active. Study how people write and talk on forums.
From my personal experience, anyway, reading (and writing) does not help all that much. I can read & write several languages: I can't actually speak anything but English, and that not all that well. My understanding of spoken language is also much less than written.
The last is even true of English. I'd guess my written vocabulary - words I've seen written, would know the meaning of, and could use in a sentence - is as least 5-10 times larger than the words I've ever heard used in speech.
