When I was originally learning English (2nd language) I would break down sentences by words, but with Japanese sentences, there aren’t “spaces” that separate text and often I get confused trying to read sentences as I am not sure whether one word starts/ends. Often I end up feeling a bit overwhelmed as if it looks like I’m trying to read one giant word.
I have been self-studying using YouTube and whatever free resource I can find on the internet (thankfully there are tons!), but I don’t think I ever ran into a “how to read sentences” approach so maybe I’m learning incorrectly. Does anyone have any advice/tips?
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Well, I’m afraid this may seem a bit of a “harsh truth” answer, but the most likely source of your troubles is that you simply don’t (yet) understand enough about Japanese words, grammar, and just how Japanese sentences structure works in general.
In particular, if you have a good grasp of how particles work, along with vocabulary and how verbs/adjectives/noun+copula, etc. conjugate and function, then it should be pretty much clear what is and isn’t a single meaningful unit, where the breaks are between words and clauses, etc.
Can I ask what sort of free resources you’re using specifically for learning Japanese grammar and sentence structure? Even popular free online guides like Tae Kim or whatever should be sufficient to get a basic handle on the sort of things that seem to be giving you trouble.
You may want to work on some grammar concepts. There will be Verb tenses, particles, etc that are in hiragana that will break up the kanji.
A lot of asian languages are non-segmented. I actually find Kanji to be easier to parse as most of the grammatical parts will stand out as hiragana, and loan words as katakana, leaving everything else as a kanji+hiragana conjugation. Coming from a Chinese background I find this easier than pure kana.
Our minds are great at recognizing patterns, and as you become more familiar with distinguishing words and grammar structures it will become much easier to know where words end and begin.
Thai uses a phonetic script, but is also non-segmented. Even having been literate in Chinese for 17 years, and comfortable with parsing Japanese, Thai has been a bit of a struggle to start with. But, similar to starting with Japanese, the more you read the more familiar the patterns become and you find elements to help anchor yourself in the sentence.
Back to Japanese, these anchors may be grammatical particles, seeing wa, ga, or ka should immediately tell you something about the surrounding symbols. As you run into exceptions, such as the non-particle wa being ha, your mind will build rules to ignore it as a particle in that context.
Doing some purposed practice, maybe with printing out a paragraph and coloring/classifying the different words and grammatical elements, studying these sentences with a grammar book to help understand what is going on grammatically. When you find sentences you don’t understand what the grammar is doing, then go back to this practice, tear the sentence apart, and try to understand how the grammar is working, then plug in different things with the same structure.
Depending on your listening/reading skills, you can play audio with subtitles and listen to the sentence and get your ears used to hearing the emphasis placed on different parts. There are no kanji in listening, just like there are no spaces in listening in English.
Ultimately it is spending the time and effort to familiarize yourself with the language and allow your brain to do the thing it does best and work out and apply the rules of grammar and parsing text/sound.
A quick rule of thumb is to look for the particles first は、へ、を、に、の and markers of verb conjugation finalities て、た、だ、ます because those indicate separation of concepts. Also consecutive kanjis usually just mean one word (generally a noun) because they kind of need a particle afterwards to do something with.
Kanji generally start words. Chinese-based words are generally kanji strung together. Japanese original words mostly have a kanji at the beginning, followed by hiragana. Particles like は、が、を、に、へ、で、から、as well as の and such generally come after main words. So 東京へ行った。has a Chinese-like double-kanji word, then a particle, then a kanji starting a conjugated Japanese-original verb that ends in hiragana.
usually particles or punctuation separate different words