Reading Russian Dialogue

I've said before that I've been in two minds about reading Russian. People like Steve Kaufmann advocate reading as soon as possible and while he is able to acquire languages quite quickly, his accents in each one are usually not that great. Other people say that you shouldn't start reading until you've been listening for hundreds or even thousands of hours.

For me the most important aspect in all my endeavours is that I need to be able to do it sustainably over the long term. Whether it's exercise, a hobby or a business idea I always think about how I can incorporate it into my life in such a way that I will put in consistent effort, week after week, month after month.

After just over two months I can definitely say that the current approach is more enjoyable and more sustainable than my previous attempts (Michel Thomas, Duolingo, Memrise). 

But I do want to give myself some variety to keep things interesting so I've decided that a good middle ground is to read Russian that is accompanied with correct pronunciation. A video like the one below has slow simple dialogue that is easy for me to follow. 

Back in the summer I found these videos which I found very entertaining. It's real dialogue with official transcriptions. It's very fast so I have to pause it often, but the content is interesting. BTW there are many more Russian videos on the main Easy Languages channel.

I've been thinking about how to read. I notice that when reading English I see the whole word as one unit of information and pronounce it all at once. But if I come across an unfamiliar word I slow down and break it into parts, pronouncing each set of phonemes in turn. This sometimes causes me to mispronounce the word in a way I don't realise until I hear it being said.

Something similar could happen if I was new to Russian and I saw the word пожалуйста. I might pronounce the й. But listening to native speakers I don't really hear it. If any Russians want to correct me on that please let me know!

Anyway this brings me to the conclusion that when reading and listening at the same time I should make sure not to sub-vocalise, or read in my head in such a way that I'm making a mistake. I should see the word and hear the native pronunciation. If I want to repeat it out loud, make sure I'm matching the way native person is saying it.

What are your thoughts on reading Russian? Do you think it's good to start as soon as possible or to wait until you've been listening for hundreds of hours? Or do you think my approach is a good one?