How do I get an accurate translation for the words/sentences? When you practice reading, what's the best way to find the correct meaning and translation?

[s0apgun]

Don't worry about the accurate translation because there really is no such thing. Understand the individual vocab words and grammar patterns in each sentence. Try to understand the sentence meaning in Japanese way.

User on here drdunlap recommended that you don't question why things are or look for a correct meaning but internalize things so that you say to yourself oh thats how you say so and so in Japanese or thats how this works. Accept the way Japanese works because a lot of beginners make the mistake when going to production that they are trying to say things like you would in English but in Japanese.

I'm not sure if you're reading the MANGA on your computer but I use this program to read Manga. It uses the JDIC dictionary I believe for vocab and grammar definitions.

http://www.kanjitomo.net/

It lets you hover or words on your screen like Rikai but works for images.

I use this manga reader in conjunction with kanjitomo for lookups.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home...MMCE.shtml

IF you're really trying to a get an accurate translation try entering the whole sentence into the JDIC text glosser. It will give you a definition for each thing in the sentence recognized.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?9T

A lot of people use the WEBLIO dictionary for better definitions and examples.

http://ejje.weblio.jp/

This is a great choice to begin reading Japanese with. To make it even easier and more pleasant an experience, I recommend getting the reading packs that go with this manga. There are two and you can get each of 'em at the following site:

http://www.livingjapanese.com/p/reading-pack.html

I don't think you need to worry too much about understanding everything (which is actually quite difficult). Just give it a go, and if you understand something that's great and if you don't you don't. If you have questions about particular sentences, ask in the "What's this word/phrase?" thread.

[s0apgun]

Yep.

I can tell you that I read a lot everyday and often times I will understand something completely and other times barely get the meaning beyond vocab definitions. Regardless, daily I am making progress and understanding things more clearly as I keep going.

The big thing I've noticed is my reading speed & comprehension has increased drastically from basically reading a bunch of stuff that I only got the gist of in the beginning.

Do you guys stop reading when you come across something you don't know and look it up or do you wait until you finish reading? That's the problem I am having. I just started reading and there are a lot of words I don't know.

If you get really stuck at something, its pretty easy to find english translations of it if you look on google. At first, it might be good to read in english just to get an idea of whats going on, then go back again and read in Japanese.

[s0apgun]

jordan3311 Wrote:Do you guys stop reading when you come across something you don't know and look it up or do you wait until you finish reading? That's the problem I am having. I just started reading and there are a lot of words I don't know.

Yes, one word at a time. Don't completely gloss over a sentence without having some idea of what it means even if its only very basic.

Use software like kanji tomo and rikai chan to speed up lookups. If you're using a hard copy they should include furigana so you can type the word and check its definition.

jordan3311 Wrote:Do you guys stop reading when you come across something you don't know and look it up or do you wait until you finish reading? That's the problem I am having. I just started reading and there are a lot of words I don't know.

It depends on what you're trying to do. If you're reading it to study, then sure - I guess look up the words as you come to them. It's called 'intensive reading' - and you should still know at least 90% of the vocabulary you're coming across.
The other way of doing things is called 'extensive reading', and you should know enough to guess most of the unknown words from context while reading quickly. And if you miss a sentence occasionally, well, whatever. There's plenty more where that came from.

Personally, I never look up words while reading, and if a book is hard enough that I need to I find another book. If I'm going to study, I might as well use Anki. If I'm going to read a book, I might as well enjoy it (or experience tells me I'll stop reading them).
Plus, this way it's not 'reading practice', it's just reading. It's like I've achieved my goals already! Feels good.

Aikynaro Wrote:

jordan3311 Wrote:Do you guys stop reading when you come across something you don't know and look it up or do you wait until you finish reading? That's the problem I am having. I just started reading and there are a lot of words I don't know.

It depends on what you're trying to do. If you're reading it to study, then sure - I guess look up the words as you come to them. It's called 'intensive reading' - and you should still know at least 90% of the vocabulary you're coming across.
The other way of doing things is called 'extensive reading', and you should know enough to guess most of the unknown words from context while reading quickly. And if you miss a sentence occasionally, well, whatever. There's plenty more where that came from.

Personally, I never look up words while reading, and if a book is hard enough that I need to I find another book. If I'm going to study, I might as well use Anki. If I'm going to read a book, I might as well enjoy it (or experience tells me I'll stop reading them).
Plus, this way it's not 'reading practice', it's just reading. It's like I've achieved my goals already! Feels good.

Everyones gotta start somewhere though. If a book is one of the simplest ones like yotsubato but you still have to look up words often, there's nothing you can do but do that because there's not much that's easier afaik.

Well, if it doesn't bore/irritate you to do it, I don't think it's a bad thing. But giving up is totally an option too. If you spend the time building your vocabulary instead it won't take long before you can read manga at that level without going for the dictionary every few seconds. Come back after a month of study and what looked hard before is suddenly not.
How long have you been studying for?

There are easier manga out there than Yotsuba too. The first series I found that I could read freely was 'Life' (ライフ) after a few months of studying. I think a lot of simple drama/romance stuff is easier than Yotsuba (where you have stuff like puns on 翻訳者　and こんにゃく者　in the first volume, iirc).

I haven't read life but I saw the drama that was fast paced and fu. To watch. So in that way I recommend it too. Also try song lyrics with rikaichan. Song lyrics are really helpful since u hear it, its fun, and stuff repeats

Aikynaro Wrote:There are easier manga out there than Yotsuba too. The first series I found that I could read freely was 'Life' (ライフ) after a few months of studying. I think a lot of simple drama/romance stuff is easier than Yotsuba (where you have stuff like puns on 翻訳者　and こんにゃく者　in the first volume, iirc).

Seconding the recommendation of Life. Not only is it fairly easy, but it's really, really good.
Some other easy reads would be Chi's Sweet Home, Peach Girl, or Aku no Hana.
One of the really great things about Yotsubato! though is that the other characters explain what words mean to Yotsuba, so sometimes it's almost like using a J-J dictionary, except way more entertaining.

jordan3311 Wrote:Do you guys stop reading when you come across something you don't know and look it up or do you wait until you finish reading? That's the problem I am having. I just started reading and there are a lot of words I don't know.

I generally look up everything. I know not everyone has the patience for that, but it really helped me build an SRS list containing the words I really cared about. Eventually, the reading gets easier. I'm at the point where I can read 夏と花火と私の死体 with at most one or two lookups every couple of pages.

That said, I did start with ライトノベル, where the language and syntax tended to be a lot simpler. I have set books aside because I found reading them too painful at my current level (リング still sits on my shelf bookmarked at page 79, taunting me). Use your judgment. So long as you're still enjoying working through a specific book, keep at it.

Aikynaro Wrote:Well, if it doesn't bore/irritate you to do it, I don't think it's a bad thing. But giving up is totally an option too. If you spend the time building your vocabulary instead it won't take long before you can read manga at that level without going for the dictionary every few seconds. Come back after a month of study and what looked hard before is suddenly not.
How long have you been studying for?

There are easier manga out there than Yotsuba too. The first series I found that I could read freely was 'Life' (ライフ) after a few months of studying. I think a lot of simple drama/romance stuff is easier than Yotsuba (where you have stuff like puns on 翻訳者　and こんにゃく者　in the first volume, iirc).

Studying "what" is key I think. I started learning Japanese in March of last year but at first it was RTK and that took at least 3 months, then there was a big time frame where I was trying to figure out where to go from there but I started learning vocabulary/did sentence mining shortly after.

I look up some words and ignore others depending on how I determine the difficulty of looking it up to be. If I can guess at how to pronounce the word, know other words that use the same kanji, or if it's all in hiragana (or has furigana), then I'll be more likely to look it up.
Sometimes, I have enough context to understand the word without looking it up; I usually skip these, unless it pops up multiple times, since I'll get frustrated at not knowing how to read the word.
If I remember the reading of a word and not what it means, then I'll look it up.
If I'm reading something that doesn't use furigana on every word, then I look up almost every word that it's used on.
Mainly though, I only look up words that really bother me when reading something longer than a news article, especially since Tadoku has started.

The biggest thing is that I understand what's going on. I always read above my level growing up, so I often encountered words that I didn't know. Considering we didn't have internet at the time (and I hated stopping to look things up in the dictionary), I certainly wasn't going to look up every unknown word. This is the same kind of method, just applied to Japanese.

I also highly recommend studying vocabulary from something like Core to boost your vocabulary while you're reading; you're going to see a lot of those words eventually and the work has already been done for you, so it's very efficient. Continuing to read while studying vocabulary allows words you've learned to sink in better and allows you to see that you are, in fact, making progress when you start to feel like you've gotten nowhere.