Just a question about my Japanese studies

Japanese
#1

Hi everyone,

this is my first post on this forum and I’m pretty excited!

I have been studying Japanese for quite a while now but only recently started using Bunpro (for grammar and vocab). My vocabulary is mid-N3 now and I have just finished N3 grammar.

I try to immerse myself by reading short stories on Natively and by occasionally (very irregularly) listening to Japanese podcasts for learners. But despite being an intermediate learner I have great difficulties to figure out the meaning of many sentences even if they only contain grammar structures and words I thought to know. And I am aware that this is normal when you start out reading native material but I am getting really frustrated nevertheless.

I would be really grateful for some tips or simply your view on my situation. Maybe you have experienced a similar situation and could share how you overcame it. Thank you so much!
(And sorry that this got so long :sweat_smile:)

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#2

As someone who started reading native material for the first time this year too, I have found that just writing/typing out the sentence on a separate page makes a massive difference for this kind of feeling when you begin.

It allows you to highlight different phrases and add spaces, brackets, and commas that aren’t in the original sentence but that can help you parse what is going on. For me at least, this visual distinction was often all I needed to make sentences click.

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#3

That happened to me too when I started reading native materials. They feel completely different compared to things like graded readers. But I think its normal, don’t worry! You’ll get used to it. The more you do it the better you get at it. You WILL improve and everything will start making sense :+1:

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#4

That’s a really clever approach!
I have also tried to do this in my head but I think it is more effective if you do it visually like you said. Thank you!

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#5

There are a few methods that I have used that I would recommend for bridging the Gap between ambiguity and comprehension.

The first method that I used was reading Harry Potter, if there is a series of books that you know really well that have been translated into Japanese I would highly recommend giving them a read in ePub format with yomitan.

Method the second is to find a series that has an anime adaptation and both a manga and light novel. You want to watch the anime preferably in Japanese with subtitles, then go through the manga with a program like mokuro or a less sophisticated OCR program. And finally read an epub with yomitan. This method gives an abundance of context that makes everything a lot easier to understand and also progressively increases difficulty as anime are often easier to understand than manga which are easier to understand than light novels.

The only other thing I would recommend when you’re starting out is to Branch out often and read many different things authors all have different styles and many of them front load the hardest portions of their books in the first couple chapters when there’s a lot of exposition and world building. Very often they’ll reuse a lot of terms and the rest of the book will be a lot smoother to read. But you should be seeking out friction when you’re learning, like progressive overload when working out.