+- kanji koohii FORUM (http://forum.koohii.com)
+-- Forum: Learning Japanese (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-4.html)
+--- Forum: The Japanese language (http://forum.koohii.com/forum-10.html)
+--- Thread: Reading and listening troubles (/thread-12063.html)
Reading and listening troubles - jordan3311 - 2014-08-10
I am having some trouble with reading and listening. Sometimes, I will know all the words or grammar points in a sentence but I will not understand the meaning of the sentence. This has been happening a lot since I started reading manga and online articles. I am not sure what I should do to fix this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Reading and listening troubles - DrJones - 2014-08-10
Read and listen more until the brain streamlines the process. Until you get used to japanese, read texts with already available translations to make sure you get the real meaning of a sentence.
Also, do a second reading/listening/translation after a short time. For some reason, the second time I seem to catch the meaning better than on my first attempt; spoken lines also sound clearlier.
Reading and listening troubles - juniperpansy - 2014-08-10
Do you have the English translations to help you out?
I found subs2srs really helped me at this kind of thing and by using a grammar guide (tae kim's) when I still didn't understand
Reading and listening troubles - jordan3311 - 2014-08-10
I don't have the English translation. The manga that I'm reading is all in Japanese. Also the online articles are all in Japanese.
Reading and listening troubles - Realism - 2014-08-10
Save the sentences that are you giving you trouble in a word file or something, and just keep on reading Japanese.
Eventually you'll come across sentences that are similar and you'll get it.
Reading and listening troubles - Inny Jan - 2014-08-10
Your brain needs a guiding hand and time in resolving incomprehensible superposition of known items into a comprehensible content. There are two ways to go about this:
1. Get yourself material that will show you how Japanese phrases can be translated into their English equivalents. (I used “Read Real Japanese – Essays” and “Read Real Japanese – Fiction” both are good although the essays have somewhat better explanations, IMO. Or you can use some other bilingual texts.)
2. Keep coming back to texts/audios that you didn’t get the first time. You will get more of what’s in there on each reading/listening – vocabulary and overall understanding wise. Again, as a personal anecdote, I had an audio from a movie that on the first listing was just a noise to me. I couldn’t find Japanese subtitles for that movie but I did find English ones. I kept/keep listening to that audio (I can’t really tell you how many times I did that) and these days, I can understand like 70-80% of what’s in there. Again, this is raw Japanese audio.
Few days ago there was a program on Australian TV that talked about the past Hiroshima and the current Fukushima. It was kind of satisfying to be able to follow what Japanese people in that program were saying without looking at the English translations.
Reading and listening troubles - sparky14 - 2014-08-10
The answer is simple: keep reading! I'm 10 months in and things are only NOW starting to make sense.
Reading and listening troubles - Aikynaro - 2014-08-10
How often is this happening?
It's pretty normal, I think. But if it's happening a lot it just means that what you're trying to read is too difficult. If it only happens once in a while and you generally understand the book/whatever, just take a best-guess and move on. It's probably not important and the more you read the easier it gets. Not worth fussing over a single line too much.
There's always the possibility that you've hit an idiom, in which case you didn't have a chance anyway.
What manga are you reading?
There's a reasonable chance that there's an English translation available.
Reading and listening troubles - bertoni - 2014-08-11
jordan3311 Wrote:I am having some trouble with reading and listening. Sometimes, I will know all the words or grammar points in a sentence but I will not understand the meaning of the sentence.I think this is normal. It was for me, anyway. Fundamentally, you just need more practice. If you have a tutor or someone who can help you with those sentences, that'd be best, but, if not, just keep going, or locate easier materials, depending on how much trouble you're having.
I guess this mostly is a pep talk.
Reading and listening troubles - Cyborg Ninja - 2014-08-13
I have had this problem, and still do a bit, and I feel that studying colloquial Japanese is the most helpful tool. Japanese sentence structure is rather loose, and barely held together by particles. Perhaps we need to just get the gist of those particles and it will all be easier from there.
Reading and listening troubles - Tzadeck - 2014-08-13
I'd really recommend the "Read Real Japanese" books at this point. It really helps to have explanations for difficult sentences and cultural differences. And there are also translations for everything if you need them. The Fiction book actually has a really good collection of stories too.