.....

I think I pretty nearly never do this. Usually when I have trouble with reading a sentence it's because there are too many words I don't know in it. Or occasionally I run into sentences which are short and where I know what all the individual parts mean but can't identify the overall meaning at all. But I don't generally have trouble with sentences being too grammatically complex. So I just read sentences starting at the beginning and working forward.

I don't consider it cheating but sometimes I need to look extra carefully at how all the particles are interacting before I can properly 'get' the sentence, and sometimes I still don't get it. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what a subordinate clause is, the only clause I know is of the Santa variety.

(2015-12-26, 5:32 pm)john555 Wrote: By "cheating" I mean:  you come to a really long convoluted sentence with multiple levels of subordination, so to make it easier you make note of the topic of the sentence at the beginning, you skip right to the very end to see what the main verb is, then you work backwards from the end, disentangling everything and recasting it into the form of subordinate clauses you can more easily follow.

I do this from time to time...it really helps.

I just wonder if the experienced readers still do this from time to time.

(side note:  I assume native Japanese speakers don't do this...or do they?).

I think this is natural for any sentence with an abundance of relative clauses.  In fact, ADIJG devotes a whole special section to just that.

For the opposite recommendation to ADIJG see the chapter in Jay Rubin's _Making Sense of Japanese_ where he explains how to deal with a complicated sentence starting at the front and working forwards, rather than starting at the end and working backwards.

Edit: this is a quote from the end of that chapter:
"I used to have students analyze a Japanese sentence by identifying the main verb, which is usually easy to find at the end, then going back to search for the subject and objects and so forth in a game of ping-pong between the sentence's beginning and end, with unpredictable bounces in the middle — a real decoding process if there ever was one. [...] I'd like to think the approach I've outlined here, emphasizing anticipation, does less violence to the structure of the Japanese."

So starting with the verb is a pretty common and natural technique for second language learners, but it's not the only option.

(2015-12-26, 6:10 pm)Roketzu Wrote: I couldn't for the life of me tell you what a subordinate clause is

This is my problem as well. I have no sense for what constitutes a relative/subordinate clause in English, let alone Japanese. Our brains just make them without too much thought. Its pretty unfortunate too since clauses are what make your language use sound more native. If you are chaining small sentences together you end up sounding like a small child.

(2015-12-26, 8:01 pm)vix86 Wrote:

(2015-12-26, 6:10 pm)Roketzu Wrote: I couldn't for the life of me tell you what a subordinate clause is

This is my problem as well. I have no sense for what constitutes a relative/subordinate clause in English, let alone Japanese. Our brains just make them without too much thought. Its pretty unfortunate too since clauses are what make your language use sound more native. If you are chaining small sentences together you end up sounding like a small child.

I've caught myself now in my written and spoken Japanese backtracking on a sentence so that I can insert a relative clause in front of my nouns. I've pretty much got it down for simple relative clauses, but for complex thoughts, it usually takes two or three efforts to get it right. Yesterday I tried to write (in Japanese), "There was the issue with the jeering of Diet member Shiomura Ayaka, who was subjected to discrimination when fellow members of the Diet shouted things like, 'Wouldn't it be better if you got married?' while she was mustering support for childbirth and child-rearing for Japanese women", and nearly gave myself a mental hernia.

Exactly. That sentence was probably easy as hell for you to write in your native language; you could have done it while watching TV, but it took all you had to do it in Japanese. Its pretty annoying. I think relative clauses (understanding and production usage) are probably a good ruler for determining how close you are to native fluency. I know that in English, Wh-movemnt in sentences/relative clauses, are often studied with ESL learners as they have trouble acquiring an understanding of how they work. Yet, kids that have been speaking English for a few years seem to have them down pact.

(2015-12-26, 5:54 pm)pm215 Wrote: Usually when I have trouble with reading a sentence it's because there are too many words I don't know in it. 

This is my problem too.  When a sentence has a couple words I don't know then the gears in my brain just come to a complete stop.

I remember doing that, finding the verb at the end and working backwards to decode. So many things are reversed in order in Japanese compared to English, so sometimes I even did it within clauses. Nowadays, however, I'm much smoother at reading and always read the sentence beginning to end first .... which doesn't mean I don't sometimes have to re-read with more insight now that I've seen the end of the sentence, but I don't 'decode' like that very often anymore. (And honestly, I was never very good at decoding. If I have to try to reason out the meaning of a sentence by trying to remember grammar rules, there's a good chance I'm going to get it wrong, or at least there was when I was decoding often. My overall understanding is better now so context keeps me on track. I'm -still- bad at decoding isolated sentences... either I can read it intuitively or I'm probably going to screw it up.)

A habit of mine, that I think is a good one, is to re-read the sentence (sometimes aloud if I'm alone) if I had to decode it rather than read it. This helps establish in my mind the natural flow of the sentence in the correct order. A lot of being a fluent reader or listener is to understand the sentence in Japanese words and Japanese grammar without mental translation or reordering, which in turn has a lot to do with simply being accustomed to a lot common phrases and patterns (or word collocations, if you prefer.) I'll also often re-read a sentence if I had to pause and do a mental translation or dictionary lookup of a word, for the same reason of just establishing the natural flow of the sentence properly in my mind. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sometimes too eager to pursue the plot to bother with that after getting the gist of the sentence, but in most such cases I take the time to reread.

I only really cheat in the sense that when I read articles online, I too often rely on Rikaikun for every little thing. Even words I already know. I'm often second-guessing how well I know how to read certain words.

(2015-12-26, 10:42 pm)TheVinster Wrote: I only really cheat in the sense that when I read articles online, I too often rely on Rikaikun for every little thing. Even words I already know. I'm often second-guessing how well I know how to read certain words.

My rule for that is to always read the article through once without rikaikun, and then go back afterwards to read through a second time doing lookups on the words I didn't know or was mostly sure of or knew meaning but not reading or whatever.

(2015-12-26, 10:42 pm)TheVinster Wrote: I only really cheat in the sense that when I read articles online, I too often rely on Rikaikun for every little thing. Even words I already know. I'm often second-guessing how well I know how to read certain words.

Yes! I had a phase of that. I went to the extreme and just uninstalled Rikaikun and it really lead to improvements in reading skills and confidence.