LLearn Japanese

My Question About Understanding Words

When I am immersing, is it better to understand a sentence by translating it or just by understanding the sentence as it is? For example, 「彼女は旅から帰ったばかりらしい。」 and go “Ok, so let me think… that meant I heard just returned from her travels.” or go like “「彼女は旅から帰ったばかりらしい。」means「彼女は旅から帰ったばかりらしい。」. …Thinking… I get it!” What direction should I be taking?

3 comments

  1. You’re overthinking it. If you hear a sentence and you are able to derive meaning from it, you succeeded. It doesn’t matter how you got there. The more you keep doing it, the faster you will get until the words and the grammar become ingrained and eventually you don’t need to relate things back to your first language.

  2. The latter is the way languages are actually used, but the former can be a helpful stepping stone to it. You want to be in a position of not having to translate, but a lot of people overstate the idea that translation is bad. As a beginner it’s normal, just try not to rely on it too much.

  3. I recommend taking it in as what it is. Dont worry about wondering what the English translation is of that word is but if you’re wanting to become a translator one day then I’d say go right ahead but overall, if you don’t worry about what each word means. You’ll understand alot more than you’d think you would

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