This will sound really stupid but it sort of seems like I have a 1 second memory span when reading sentences sometimes. For instance, I was just on Youtube and saw the sentence:

10 月 16 日は世界食料デー。

It's like I don't really take in the topic. I'm like "Oh it's 'world food day,' how nice... but when/what is it again?" I know I read the topic but can't really remember it until I take a moment to think about it or go back and read it a second time. I'm really trying to avoid doing this and it's also, naturally, harming my listening.

Is there any advice for this kind of problem? Am I the only one experiencing it?

Ha. I do this in English (my native language.) Especially with boring and long winded text books. It sucks to have no memory/attention span. Really makes learning another language that more difficult.

I assume it happens with more than just numbers? I only ask since your example was about a date, and dates just aren't interesting to remember. There was discussion recently in another thread about how hard numbers are to get down as they're basically a language of their own.

That being said, sorry, no real advice for ya.

This has happened to me several times as well. Not quite sure what to do about it though.

Thanks a lot for these responses everyone.

strugglebunny Wrote:Ha. I do this in English (my native language.) Especially with boring and long winded text books. It sucks to have no memory/attention span. Really makes learning another language that more difficult.

Now you mention it, it's true I often have to read sentences more than once in my native English to fully take it in (especially when it's boring or I'm tired or something). I do have a pretty short attention span I guess and this could be a big factor.

With that said though, I feel it's a little different. It's hard to explain, but I definitely think my problem revolve (mainly) around the は particle. I've read up on it time and time again, know it indicates the topic, indicates the rest of the sentence is a comment about it but my head STILL goes into a frenzy whenever I see/hear it. I don't know why.

I was playing a Japanese text adventure games last night and when I saw "僕は" at the start of a sentence I was like 'craaap, ok wait a minute. It's 'I (about)' and the rest of the sentence is about it. Okay lets go with that!,' and when I start reading it just doesn't feel right. When I hear ”これは” I know it means "about this" but I just don't know if the right message is sent to my brain. Half of me's wondering why は is there in the first place, if it wasn't there I could probably guess これ is the topic anyway.

Actually that brings me to my next point and why I'm not completely sure this is related to the attention span thing. If ANOTHER particle is used I seem to be a lot more comfortable with it.　If someone said to me "これにきたら" I'd just think 'yep, go ahead and tell me about it". I'm even okay with が。That just says to me ' ~ is in the state of:'.

Other things that throw me about the は particle is some of the English tranlations it gets. It tends to be stuff related around "about," "speaking of," etc. but this just does not feel natural to me. Something like "私の名前はスーです。" is just so simple and self explanatory it just doesn't seem to require something like "Speaking about my name, it's Sue." Or if someone does something surprising and an onlooker says ”お、お前は...,” "a-about you..." doesn't seem like it makes sense

It seems every particle sends a specific message to my brain except は. That justs sends a spanner.

What am I missing? What should I do?

Perhaps I should just take this back to basics and study the definition of 'topic.'

If I was to take the (completely random) sentence of, "Jet-skiing is popular in France." what is the topic here? Why is it the topic in the first place? If it's not jet-skiing then why is it France (or vise-versa)?

One good explanation I read was that は acts like ":".
so... 私の名前はＪｕｄｙです。 My name: Judy.
That's how I usually think of it.

crayonmaster Wrote:One good explanation I read was that は acts like ":".
so... 私の名前はＪｕｄｙです。 My name: Judy.
That's how I usually think of it.

That's interesting. That's the kind of thinking that seems to work for me.

I'll try look at it like that for a bit and see how I go.

Yeah, I get the same thing when reading Japanese. I need to pay special attention to keeping the rest of the sentence in my head while puzzling out the rest of it. Your brain can only hold up to 7 things at once, and when you're rifling through your memory trying to remember what things mean, many of those spots get taken up at once. How the word looks, the pronunciation, the individual kanji and kana, and then some other stuff to remember where you first learned it, etc. Do that for a few words in a row and it's very, very easy to lose the rest of the sentence.

As Japanese becomes second-nature to you, you won't have to specifically try to remember... But until then, that's how it is.

wccrawford Wrote:Yeah, I get the same thing when reading Japanese. I need to pay special attention to keeping the rest of the sentence in my head while puzzling out the rest of it. Your brain can only hold up to 7 things at once, and when you're rifling through your memory trying to remember what things mean, many of those spots get taken up at once. How the word looks, the pronunciation, the individual kanji and kana, and then some other stuff to remember where you first learned it, etc. Do that for a few words in a row and it's very, very easy to lose the rest of the sentence.

As Japanese becomes second-nature to you, you won't have to specifically try to remember... But until then, that's how it is.

Hah. That's actually really informative and encouraging.

I was wondering whether I'd eventually get used to it or not but there's the not knowing that can be a real kick in the self esteem. It's true, the likes of "ケーキを食べた" seem as plain as English to me whereas (presumably) once it wasn't (can't really imagine that now). Hopefully the rest will follow in a similar manner eventually.

Another observation I've made which I find quite encouraging is (though I may be wrong) spoken Japanese(/all languages?) is generally simpler than written. Perhaps I can get away with going over sentences more than once and still be good enough in listening, too.

Anyway, I'm trying to get used to the は/: way of thinking so I'm using Google to do half arsed translations. I'm sort of noticing they do fit with ':' but I'm wondering others are more suited to '=' as well?

Just using the first examples that came up after searching は...

Twitterは技術ではなく、人間性の勝利
Twitter: not a technique, a triumph of humanity

ハンゲームは Microsoft Windows および Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0でご利用ください
Hangame (name of site): Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 (by means of) please use

はてラボは *.hatelabo.jp ドメインで運営されており、
Haterabo: hatelabo.jp domain (by way of) being managed (...)

友だち作りは、 オシャレから始まる！
The making of friends: it starts from talking!

私たちシックス・アパートはブログの会社です
We, the Six Apart (name of site): blog('s) company.

僕の彼女はサイボーグ
My girlfriend: cyborg

渡る世間は鬼ばかり
The world (we) live in: nothing but demons

To me it seems the shorter sentences' は could be paraphrased with '='. (ie. 僕の彼女=サイボーグ). What do you guys think about this?

For the sake of comparison I just came up with a bunch of English sentences using the 'colon' way of thinking. Complete random:

trainspotting: cool pastime
the making of pottery: comparatively difficult
computer problems: annoying
this coat: itchy
the mug: empty
cousin getting eaten by lions: think it's tragic but funny
Cradle of Filth: touring the world
Wa particle: basic but hard
my name: Patrick
this: rough feeling
coffee: nice
clothes: hanging

I'm also trying to saying it flowingly rather than, say, 'the mug - empty'. I'm saying 'the mug empty' with an assumed colon-like nuance.

Deep down I sort of though HA meant 'is' in some ways but this really shows me it's not.

This might be a complete waste of time but I'm going to try and think like this for a while.

Edit - I might be going crazy but I sound kind of like a Japanese person saying English when I think in this manner.

This seems like I'm seriously over doing it for such a basic grammar point and I am trying to stay away from English as much as I can... but if this means I can nail this forever then I: willing to try.

wccrawford Wrote:Yeah, I get the same thing when reading Japanese. I need to pay special attention to keeping the rest of the sentence in my head while puzzling out the rest of it. Your brain can only hold up to 7 things at once, and when you're rifling through your memory trying to remember what things mean, many of those spots get taken up at once.

Yeah. I find this often happens with sentences that are kind of on the border of my level of understanding. Some sentences are straightforward; some have enough unknown vocabulary or grammar that throws me so I don't understand them to start with unless I start wading in with the dictionary; the ones where you think you understood all the pieces but fetched up at the end of the sentence with no real idea what it was lie in the middle. I guess that means these are the ones to try to focus on to push them down into the 'easy' category :-)

Virtua_Leaf Wrote:To me it seems the shorter sentences' は could be paraphrased with '='

One of the grammar notes in the back of _Read Real Japanese_ says that the usual pronunciation of '=' is in fact は... (well, presumably わ, but you know what they mean).

I suspect that thinking of は as either ':' or '=' covers a fair chunk of its usage, but (like "as for") will at some point lead you astray. After all, if it were this easy there wouldn't be so much of the literature devoted to the finer points of は and が. The section of Rubin's _Understanding Japanese_ on the subject is worth a look if you haven't read it before.

It seems you have 2 separate problems.

First, for the は thing, I think you're overthinking it. Think of はas just a way of seperating the sentence in 2 parts, 1 of which applies to the other. I think you should start worrying less about it, you'll get it anyway, it's just matter of experience.

Second, memory is a skill you can develop by exercising it. You could work with a multimedia (dubs2srs) deck with Anki. Set the question to contain only the image/video and audio, and the answer to show you the transcription and/or the audio again. Then listen to the audio in the question and once it stops, record yourself repeating the audio with the voice recording plugin available. After that, you hit the "stop" button and read the transcription at the same time that you listen to your own voice. That way you can actually test and exercise your memory without worrying about inconciously "cheating".

I feel like I have this problem too sometimes. I will be reading through a sentence and I will understand all of the parts, but when I get to the end, I can't remember what it actually all meant. This is especially true if I find that I have to translate back into English to work out exactly what's going on. It's not a problem if I understand the sentence fully in Japanese (obviously).

Virtua_Leaf Wrote:If I was to take the (completely random) sentence of, "Jet-skiing is popular in France." what is the topic here? Why is it the topic in the first place? If it's not jet-skiing then why is it France (or vise-versa)?

I would say the topic is jet-skiing. Firstly because it comes at the beginning of the sentence, and if it was spoken, it would be emphasised. But if you said 'In France, jet-skiing is popular' I would say that 'in France' is the topic. Same applies in Japanese really.

ジェットスキーするのは、フランスに通俗です。　Jetskiing is popular in France (as apposed to other sports).
フランスにはジェットスキーするのが通俗です。 In France, jetskiing is popular (as opposed to other countries).

Well that's how I would interpret it anyway.

That 'ha' as a colon is awesome! It helps so much!

It's poor reading comprehension - do what you did at school to improve your reading comp. . When you're done reading, talk to yourself about what you just read, or write something about it on lang8.