That professional chicken sexer article was amazing and gives me hope I’ll be able to see the slight differences between kanji as I get further along.
I am surprised by how many great answers I got. I don’t even know how to reply each, but for sure I took much from them.
It seems I need to start using jisho (which I currently don’t) to maybe make things easier.
This seems useful to explain what each part of the sentence means (or at least help me break the words apart), even though the translation of the “pieces” is different from the one given by WK. Is there a specific/recommended way to use such resource?
It’s particularly useful to help you distinguish the different parts of a sentence from one another.
In the low level example sentences (at least), they replace a lot of kanji by hiragana because you don’t know the kanji yet. The problem with that, and it’s also true for beginner native reading material (read children book), is that the untrained eye will be confused between what is a grammatical word (particles) or an adverb, and what is an actual word disguised in kana form.
This website I linked should be able to tell you which is which.
What I also like about it, is that it doesn’t give you a translation. Japanese language is highly context-dependent, and instead of giving you a translation that will often be wrong, the developer lets you decide what to do with the meaning as a whole. This is really not a “translation by piece” because translation implies taking the context in account. This is purely a tool that will tell you what the sentence is made of. That’s why you notice a difference between WK’s translation and what this tool gives you.
It also gives synonyms, which is a plus.
Jisho will be your best friend ^^
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Couple ideas from my recent experience:
- You can use tools like Jisho.org and Google Translate to paste Japanese sentences into to get a half-decent parsing and/or translation of what they mean. Beware, these tools are far from perfect, but at the same time perhaps better than you might first expect.
- It doesn’t hurt, and probably helps a lot (IMHO of just one person), to study a language from more than one aspect at a time. E.g. Learning grammar helps me understand how to use the kanji and vocab words I learn here. For grammar you can go with a traditional textbook, and there’s also similar tools like BunPro which help me lots.
To be honest, I don’t really use the context sentences much either. Maybe I’m missing out on some way to take advantage of them. Or maybe learning grammar – which is currently the more difficult of the two – is where I spend most of my time with figuring out example sentences. Dunno. 
Just some ideas.
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I treat the sentences as gist-reading practice in conjunction with the translation hiding script. I’ll sound it out (as far as possible), spend a few seconds trying to make sense of what it might mean, then reveal the translation. Often enough, things only fall into place once I see the English, but celebrating the bits that I did understand (and the aha-moments for bits that I should have, but barely missed) is useful to me, as is the general reading practice.
To be sure, sometimes it’s disheartening, particularly with the third sentence. If I see lots of unknown kanji in there, I’ll just as soon give up, because it’s not worth the frustration.
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