Like the topic says, I often start reading a sentence backwards if I’m having trouble with longer sentences, as Japanese is an SOV language and English is SVO. Is this considered a bad habit? Or is it a natural way to try to translate things when reading?
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I mean, if you can’t understand a sentence when reading it from beginning to end, I don’t think anyone would say that trying other stuff to get a better handle on it is bad. As long as you recognize that that’s not the ultimate goal, and you don’t get stuck seeing no progress in your understanding over time.
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It’s not ideal, because you of course cannot do this with speech. It’s better in my opinion to practice understanding sentences front to back than getting stuck with bad habits.
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It’s something done after failing to understand it beginning to end… What’s the alternative? Banging your head against a way that isn’t working?
Breaking down the sentence into smaller chunks, so you can tackle them one at a time. Helps you practice natural sentence boundaries. Though I do admit, it’s also not something you can do during listening.
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For long sentences, isolating the main verb and taking it from there is a totally reasonable approach. There will often be lots of relevant, but ultimately superfluous, information in the middle of a long sentence in Japanese, sandwiched between the critical information. However someone needs to work on spotting the important parts when they’re still getting acclimated, I don’t see an issue.
Over time, you learn to kind of store and set aside that other info until you get to the main verb and then recompile it, but that takes time. As long as someone tries the standard way, then does other stuff, they’re always going to be at least checking if they’re making progress on the standard way to approach a sentence.
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I would consider it a bad habit. It’s probably better to re-read things or go at a slightly slower pace to try to get more comprehension in.
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Except what I’m describing is rereading the sentence. Like I don’t do it for every sentence I read. But, when reading longer sentences, especially in Keigo. It’s a lot harder to catch what is being said the first time through.
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You said you start reading the sentece backwards, isn’t that the case? if the question is 'is re-reading things a bad habit" then that’s an easy answer.
It’s a strategy for rereading the sentence. That’s what I’m asking is a bad habit or not.
Well like I said I consider that a bad habit. I say it’s better to get used to comprehending a SOV language than it is to try and break it down into SVO chunks out of order.
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Here’s a video describing a way to tackle long sentences that doesn’t involve just re-reading them beginning to end over and over, which is not literally “backwards,” but it’s similar to what I imagined you were doing in reality.
If you mean literally reading backwards word by word, then I would see that as being a little awkward, but I still wouldn’t necessarily say it’s bad if it helps your comprehension. There’s no right way to get to reading fluency for every person.
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Fair. For the most part I don’t use the strategy, but when it comes to long sentences especially in a formal register, I can’t make sense of them in SOV order yet. Well, not after the first or second re-read.
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.ti dnatsrednu pleh ot sdrawkcab secnetnes gnol daer ot tibah dab a ton s’tI
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That’s not what I’m describing and you know it. Go troll somewhere else.
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Bad hair day?
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More like no patience for someone who trolls a Japanese learning site.
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the more you read, the easier it will be to understand
and with practice you won’t need to read “backwards”
I still occasionally do flip the sentence but not as much as I used to. Typically when it’s when I think I understood then threw it into deepL to check and realize I goofed somehow. Sometimes deepL is wrong but usually it’s not the computer 
I don’t have them anymore, but there used to be a couple of sentence parser links (someone else may be able to post links to them). They were very helpful in the beginning when trying to comprehend which piece of the sentence.
A quick search turned up this:
I had found them originally in the wk forums someone else may be able to post a link (I lost the links when I switched computers and don’t really use this anymore but this type of thing was helpful in the beginning when trying to process what seemed like a wall of text.
Good luck and don’t stress too much.
Reading Japanese is supposed to be hard (I think 
)
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If you have no patience then why do you keep responding? 
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Sorry I can’t hear you over your juvenile BS
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