In my mind, reading a sentence is getting the sentence into stacking up of clauses, some ending with particle(s), so it’s kinda like that dependency diagram.
Grammar points might not fit exactly into the diagram, but cut just behind a particle, rather than connected. Also not just a particle, but a particle clause.
Store the clauses in temporary memory (RAM?) until I find the main actor. Dunno the grammatical term.
Maybe guess the next part of the sentence, but sometimes wrong, like negation or not.
I wouldn’t say as far as reading the sentence backwards, but understanding the sentence structure is essential, and re-read if you have to.
yeah it takes time to “build up the chunks” in ones head
it’s something you do naturally in any native language you don’t think about what something means you just know.
the real trick is thinking in japanese (which is a chicken egg problem for sure) how do you think in japanese w/o translating or looking stuff up when you don’t have a choice
The “find the main verb at the end” approach to analysing a complex sentence that you didn’t intuitively grasp the meaning of is fairly widely suggested. For instance the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar has an appendix “Improving Reading Skill by Identifying an Extended Sentential Unit” which describes how to analyse sentences by bouncing around the sentence identifying modified-word + modifying-clause chunks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this.
Personally I prefer an approach described in a short 10 page chapter of Jay Rubin’s book “Making Sense of Japanese”, which does the analysis from the start of the sentence forwards. The idea is that you move slowly through the sentence identifying what chunks of the sentence you are still “holding on to” waiting for a verb for them to connect to, and what chunks have already connected to a verb and play no further part in the analysis; as you go you try to anticipate what kind of verb etc the parts you’re holding on to might be expecting. I think this blends in better to the “you just read the sentence from front to back and understand it” destination you ultimately hope to get to, while still being a “consciously examine and try to understand the grammatical structure of the sentence” approach you can break out when unconscious comprehension fails.
For me the big issue is just short term memory. If a sentence is long and complicated and necessitates a couple pauses to remember the readings or meanings of a few tricky kanji or vocab along the way then by the time I reach the verb I forget where I started.
The approach you describe here assumes that I can keep that ongoing state in mind as I progress through the sentence, but deciphering Japanese early on feels like suffering from an extreme case of ADHD where meanings and readings sift through my brain as I focus on the next sentence fragment.
As such I found that translating sentences bit by bit starting with the verb is a good crutch to deal with complicated sentences. As my skills improve I do it less and less because I can parse sentences quicker and keep a larger context in my brain at any given time.
At any rate to answer OP’s question I highly doubt it’s a really bad habit. Maybe it’s inefficient by some metrics but I can’t imagine that it will lead to long term issues. As your skills improve you’ll naturally tend to read sentences in the right order and in one go because it’s just the path of least resistance.
Enlightening thread. I didn’t realize it until now that I’ve been relying on that as a crutch a lot, especially when I’m trying to skim something. Definitely gonna be more cognizant and try to exercise reading passages as they are straight through even if it’s slows stuff down for now.
I described in my long journey thread how I would read a sentence to the end, not get it, and then go back and read the first part to get it. In essence that’s reading backwards (after reading forwards).
As you get better at parsing Japanese and constructing thoughts in your head in a “Japanese way” the need should go away. Not to mention general comprehension. I mean, it’s a lot harder to remember the beginning of a 50 character sentence if it took you 30 seconds to read those 50 characters vs if it took you 10 seconds. Short term memory and general cognitive load and all that
This is what I try to do, possibly because I’ve read Jay Rubin’s book too. The main problem with it is that if there’s too much I don’t understand then it’s impossible to keep track of everything. This might just be a sign that I’m trying to do something that’s just beyond me at that moment.
Not that I think reading backwards is especially bad - sometimes I just give up and drop a sentence into Deepl - but practicing what you’re trying to get good at seems like the better approach.
Absolutely. The other important technique I use is “this sentence just has too many unknowns in it, so move on rather than spending a lot of time on it”. If a sentence has a complex structure and several words on it you don’t know and it’s about some abstract concept then it’s probably not the best context to try to learn about those things. Eventually some other sentence will turn up that only has the word you didn’t recognise, or only the complex grammar structure, and then it will be much easier to figure out and reinforce the part you don’t know.
