JJapanese

I can read words but not understand sentences WHAT DO I DO?

Hello, I’ve been studying for the past 2 years on and off Japanese and I’m at most an N5 level although I know a lot of words and kanji readings because I’ve been focusing on expanding my vocab for the past year or so.
The problem I always had with Japanese was that a lot of times I could read whole sentences but never understand what it meant. So what can I do?

3 comments

  1. Sounds like the next step then is to start focusing more on your grammar so that you’ll understand how all those words fit together! 🙂

  2. Try a book that has both languages in it so you can compare them. Something like this: [https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Stories-Language-Learners-Bilingual/dp/4805314680](https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Stories-Language-Learners-Bilingual/dp/4805314680) This way you can try and read the Japanese but easily fall back on English if you need. I’m not specifically endorsing this book. There are lots like this that you can search for based on language ability.

  3. Read more, you need quite a bit of exposure to start to get a feel for sentence structure.Especially when it comes to longer sentences, but eventually with enough practice it will start to feel more natural.

    Start with easier content, graded readers a good place to start.Also as another user suggested bilingual texts are also really helpful.I find that in a lot of cases when I can’t quite figure out what a sentence means, If I look at the English translation the majority of the time I can then go back to the Japanese sentence and reverse engineer it and figure out how the structure is working.Every time you do that you get a little better.

    Another really helpful thing is audio, when we speak, there’s a rhythm to it.We don’t speak at a consistent cadence with flat intonation, there’s variation and pauses that help us understand the structure.You’ve probably noticed this yourself when reading in your native language, occasionally you come across a sentence that doesn’t make sense on the first pass, but then read it again with a different rhythm and all of a sudden it clicks.

    Granted you won’t be able to do this while reading in Japanese right off the bat, it’s a skill you need to develop through listening.However, when possible, I recommend reading content that has accompanying audio.The native speakers rhythm will make the sentences easier to understand, and over time you’ll start to naturally mimic that rhythm when reading silently.

    Satori-reader is a service that I recommend highly that has professional audio for all it’s stories and really helped me get to grips with reading in Japanese.

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