How effective is it to break down difficult sentences?

[Jonapedia]

I’ve been doing the same thing with anime in order to pick up words that I hear but don’t understand, or new grammatical structures. I started when my grammatical knowledge was roughly at the N3 standard. It’s time-consuming and requires motivation (which is part of why I do it with anime – I’m having fun). As far as effectiveness goes… studying the grammar I came across in anime is probably the reason I was constantly bored while going through the grammar lessons in Tobira, which is an intermediate N3-low N2 textbook. I had come across almost everything already. In my opinion, it’s potentially very effective, and anything to which you attach a strong emotional response will likely be easier to recall later. However, I don’t know how much you’ll retain with a 50% comprehension rate, because I don’t know if the story still makes sense to you. I’m not saying it won’t be effective… I’ve just never tried that. I know for one that when I watch anime with subtitles, even if my listening ability is such that I understand most of the Japanese without looking at the subtitles, I won’t retain much unless I stop the video and look up the word that’s confusing me. Anything I don’t focus on and figure out doesn’t stick.

If you want to see whether or not parsing sentences you find difficult might help you, but possibly without having to do the work yourself… try this thread:

Reading ブラックジャックによろしく manga exercises (p14-and up)

Episode 3 is now done, you can see its home page for details This is a reading comprehension exercise which aims to put the community in charge of the activity. How can I participate? Take a letter and develop the interpretation of the text (you can edit your post to update/enrich your interpretation). If all the letters have been done, you can post a new message with the next page of the manga to follow the exercise Click on the ︎ to reveal the text. More detailed↓ Places …

It’s the entire reason I’m on the WK forums in the first place: I was roped in to help explain things to people who wanted to try their hand at learning Japanese by tackling a manga even though many of them didn’t quite have the grammatical knowledge required to understand it easily at the time. My way of handling translation when I took a sentence was to supply a word-for-word grammatical breakdown before providing a readable translation. This post is an example:

@Jonapedia

J

だったら なんで 手術 なんか した んだ……？
be-TARA why surgery something-like do-past [emphasis/attention]

Translation

In that case, why did (they) do something like surgery…?
だったら: if + to be (so something similar to ‘if that’s’). Can be combined with other words to form a full conditional block e.g. (This came to mind because of the manga’s contents) 医者だったら、なんで助けてあげなかった? = If (you)'re a doctor, why didn’t you help (that person)? Heads-up: ったら (with the little っ) can also be used to reinforce a statement (especially an order), or to emphasise one’s focus on a person/thing e.g. あなたったら、いつもこんな風ふうね！= You, I say, you’re always like this, huh? 早くこいったら！= Come quickly, I said!
なんで: Written with kanji, it would be 何で=what + [means]. Thus, it means ‘by what means/based on what etc’ = ‘why’
なんか: it means ‘something like’, but it can also have a slightly condescending connotation. Here, it might help to express Saitou’s disapproval and anger towards the pointless surgery.

Another example, from the NHK Easy News thread this time:

@Jonapedia

③ 容疑者ようぎしゃもやけどをして病院びょういんに入院にゅういんしていて、ベッドに寝ねたまま警察けいさつに運はこばれました。

suspect [inclusion] burn [object] do-TE hospital [location/direction] enter-hospital do-continuous-TE, bed [location] sleep-past state police [agent] transport-passive-polite-past

The suspect also sustained burns and has been admitted to hospital, and was transported by the police while remaining in bed.

容疑者: 者=person; 容=contain/enclose; 疑=suspicion. Somebody who ‘contains’ suspicion is thus a suspect .
やけど: the kanji are 火傷 (=fire-injury), but it’s supposed to mean 焼け処 (still pronounced やけど. I think ど is from どころ, which is a form of ところ=place). 焼ける means ‘to be burned/roasted’. It’s the transitive version of 焼く(yes, the kanji is still read as や). Think yakiniku(焼肉). Or 日焼け(ひやけ)=a sunburn. Thus, the suspect got burnt in the fire. The phrase for ‘to sustain burns’ is やけどをする.
入院していて: I believe the て-form of the continuous tenses (していて) is used because the suspect was still hospitalised when the police picked him up. Hence, we need to use していて to show that it was an ongoing state. (It’s also possible that he was still in hospital when this article was written.)
ベッドに寝たまま: literally ‘(in the) state of having slept in bed’, but it seems ねる can literally just mean ‘to lie down’, especially in the sense of ‘to lie in bed while sick’.
運ばれました: the base verb is はこぶ. It’s a godan verb (i.e. the verb stem changes for different forms), so we remove the U at the end and add ‘-areru’. はこばれる is an ichidan verb (i.e. the verb stem doesn’t change), so we can just remove the る for conjugation and add the past form of ます, which is ました.

I’ll leave you to take a look and ask yourself whether you feel compiling all that information and absorbing it yourself would help you retain new grammar and vocabulary. I think it can, but it depends on what suits you.