Hello,
I’m learning with Tobira and I’m about 5 chapters in and I’m having increasing problems with figuring out all the long sentences. It’s frustrating because I was counting on the book for meaningful language material that was just simple enough… (and because there’s a Skritter deck I can use)
Is there a way or method I could practice the long sentences or some kind of helpful resource or material I could use?
3 comments
Imo you’re going about it the wrong way. Being able to parse longer sentences isn’t a seperate skill- it’s just the result of having developed your base listening skills to a higher degree. Your brain will be able to parse longer sentences naturally with practice.
someone was helping me with this recently
here’s an example from tobira (you might even remember this part)
https://imgur.com/a/6BWhprG
Doing this helped me because it gave me a new way to tackle longer sentences.
Of course, I didn’t do it for every sentence (would take forever) but this is a good technique which is helpful in a bind.
The back of _A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar_ (pp. 612-618) and the front of _A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar_ (pp. [55]-[77]) have very good sections on how to make sense of more complex sentences.
In some cases, it can be helpful to start from the _end_ of a clause and work your way generally backwards, because Japanese is a [head-final language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(linguistics%29#Head-initial_vs._head-final_languages), which leads to a word order that is often (but not always) the reverse of that of English. This is _not_ something that you want to have to do forever, since it’s slower than reading forwards, but it can help in making sense of the relationships between the content words until your brain gets used to [chunking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology%29) Japanese so that you can retain information in complex sentences more easily.
edit: added a point, clarification