I’m prepping for N2 JLPT this summer, and my biggest frustration with reading is when I understand every part of a sentence and can read through it fairly quickly, but then have to go back over it to figure out what it means. My brain still doesn’t think in Japanese well enough to comprehend what I’m reading in real time. Other than continuing to read, is there anything I should be doing to improve this? Has anyone else managed to overcome this struggle? Does it ever just start to click?
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How good is your listening? You can learn to read just fine without listening if you’re committed enough but I think over the long term it helps to have good listening skills in order to be better at both.
The extra dimensionality that annunciation, pacing, tone, etc.. that speech adds to a sentence in my experience greatly helps. Can you comprehend a video essay like this one https://youtu.be/ZHnqjEfirmQ ?
In before someone just tells you to “read more” (although for N2 that’s a big part of it and you should be aiming to read native text every day – and including things like essays/opinion pieces/instructions as that’s the sort of thing they test for, not fiction).
Let’s unpack what you mean by “understand every part of a sentence…” but not being able to figure out what it means.
If you mean you recognise all the vocab individually, then there’s a few common issues:
* Your understanding of the vocab is shallow, so you’re missing some implications(that is, you know an English translation but haven’t seen the word in the wild enough to understand the tone of it), or you don’t get why X would be used instead of similar word Y.
* You’re missing things like collocations (set phrases or nouns/verbs that go together and have different meanings than the words taken individually). For example someone here a little while back got stumped by 結婚式を挙げる because they looked up – 結婚式 and 挙げる seperately.
For these two, the dictionary you are using matters. EDICT-based JP-EN (which is basically 99% of free online or app dictionaries) is real basic and doesn’t break down the different meanings of words very nicely. I like [https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/) which has JP-JP, EN-JP, JP-EN and has everything on one interface (it’s aimed at native speakers but you know, you’re going for N2 so you’re that that transition point).
There’s also these:
* Your grammar is weaker than your vocab
* You aren’t fully using the surrounding context to help you understand the sentence. Each sentence is not an island, there will be some logical flow to the text and if you are not using that information you’re hampering yourself.
From your post, I can’t tell what the issue is specifically in your case. But when you come across this, try to really look at what stumped you in the sentence. It might be certain specific grammar patterns, for example, in which case you can work on those.
I used どんな時どう使う series for N1/N2 grammar but any decent grammar guide will work.
But yes, also read more. You’ll get there.