All the sudden im stuggling, not so much with vocabulary but rather with word order and grammer. Complex sentences. Should I take a break and seek out simpler stuff or just keep going? I
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Truth is you could do either or both. If you feel like it’s too much take a break and read something you’re confident in. If you feel you can work through the challenge then just keep going.
Eventually you’re going to end up doing all of them anyway, and they are going to be uncomfortable the first time through as you learn to recognize the patterns.
Just keep doing whatever is going to keep you interested in your practice. No wrong answer
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Thanks. Ill power through and go back
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Keep in mind too this whole process is going to be flexible. You will feel this way many many times as you learn. I’m feeling the same way and just started to look for easier material for a bit, and when i have the energy will jump into harder stuff again. That’s with 3 million words read in my target language. so it just never stops haha
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What I found when things were difficult, was that it was almost always the grammar that I was not understanding like you were saying. Words are secondary and my memorization of words is why my listening is severely lacking, but I know that I can “read” once I know what the words are.
When I was doing the mini stories, I would recognize this sometimes and switch to sentence mode. Actually, I may have been doing all sentences in sentence mode. I tried to understand the sentence in isolation (most likely I couldn’t), and then I translated the sentence to see “what I missed”.
If I translated the sentence and couldn’t see how the translation worked out after accounting for words that I didn’t know before, then it signaled to me that there was a grammar problem. Usually, it was a mix of a particle with something, an ending to a word, or multiple words stuck together that hadn’t been able to work out. Note that a two “word” combination might be a grammar point that you don’t realize. Sometimes a multi word grammar point might even have some other words in between.
Some examples:
- まだ～ていません
- あまり～ない
- のは〜だ
Then there are some combinations of words that typically go with a certain word (usually verb). For example, to “take (x months)”. Take in this context often goes with a time period. There are more examples, but I can’t remember them now. But there are certain word combinations that have a sort of “predictive connection” is what I would call it. There are certain constructions that we don’t use in English that Japanese speakers use.
“Definitions” that didn’t make sense was another flag to me that there was grammar that I didn’t learn. The dictionaries many people use are often short or lacking in additional context to give a full understandable definition IMO. I think most free Japanese dictionaries are based on a certain format and have the same or very close to same definitions. When I would search the word online, I would often see that it was in fact a grammar point.
Once I knew that it was grammar, the next step was obvious to me. To look it up/search it on YouTube!
Whatever you do, I recommend to eventually complete the mini stories, or any other playlist. It might give a sense that you can do it. Ever since I read them, Japanese has literally been a daily habit of mine, and I felt like I know what learning a language “entails”. But that’s subjective and everyone’s experiences are different and valid.
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I reset and started over with story one and now im back to 27 and its so much easier this round. I decided to slow down on new kanjis and shoot for 80% word recognition on the first round concentrating on learning all the non kanji words and just getting used to reading and hearing and basic understanding. Those kanjis that repeat I start to recognize and naturally learn. I plan to go back after I go through once and learn any that ive passed on but for now this seems to be working well.
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