I am able to read in Hiragana and Katakana, and some (very) basic kanji, but I found when opening up a graded reader or a manga, I am having difficulty knowing exactly where 1 word ends or another begins, or how to look up what a word means.
So, for example, I can read fairly easily if I know the words (a simple sentence like “I ate rice”), but if the word is something complex that I haven’t learned yet (which will be a good amount of words since I’m just starting out), I can figure out what the strip of Hiragana is spelling out in terms of it’s sounds/romaji, but unable to tell when 1 word ends/another begins, or how to look up the words I don’t understand.
How did all of you face this barrier? Is there a specific app to download or an online resource that makes each word clickable so you can view what it means? Or, how did you do it with a paper book and a dictionary or…?
Just looking for any tips from those who have been here before
You can type the sentence into ChatGPT and hope that it will manage to break it down for you (which it generally does correctly about 95% of the time in my experience, probably more for simple sentences).
IMO this is less a symptom of insufficient vocabulary and more a symptom of insufficient grammar knowledge, I remember that when I started playing games in Japanese a sentence like 「相手しなけりゃいいんじゃないの？」 (to pick a random example from a videogame) was just completely baffling to look at.
But if you actually know your basic N5/N4 grammar, you can start to pick it apart fairly easily I think. 「相手・しなけりゃ(する＋〜なければ）・いい（良い）・ん・じゃない・の？」
The only word that’s not completely trivial here is 相手 (which is still very common and at WaniKani level 15), the rest is basically just pure grammar.
Having a grammar method / book is helpful for the very beginning.
Outside of the textbook, try to first parse the sentence yourself.
Then, if needed, check with a sentence parser if needed by typing the whole sentence in one of the following websites. However, it should be possible to move away from that very quickly if you are using a level appropriate grammar book and graded readers. I personally didn’t use parsers a lot. A good grammar guide and paper dictionary were sufficient, and I agree with simias, this is a grammar issue so once you get that sorted you’ll be fine
Yeah, reading hiragana-only is going to be super-difficult because it relies on you knowing the spoken language. By that I mean already having some vocabulary and grammar. It’s basically the written-down sounds that come out of people’s mouths when they speak. Ironically, the way to get better at that is to practice conversation (listening and speaking) rather than reading.
One way to attempt looking it up is to type the whole sentence into Jisho.org, it will attempt to parse it
You can often figure out word boundaries if you first identify the verb and then the particles. (some would say that kind of “reading the sentence backward” is a bad habit because that’s not how you listen, but when you’re a beginner sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do)
I hesitated to mention jisho’s breakdown feature but I preferred to point at ChatGPT because it generally performs better in my experience, especially when casual contractions and slang are involved. For instance for the sentence I mentioned in my post above, jisho mis-parses いいんじゃない as 【いいん】【じゃない】:
Unfortunately there also are times where ChatGPT just loses its marbles and hallucinates some insane explanations, so it’s a good idea to always double check its claims using a proper grammar reference.
For just vocabularies, Yomitan (or Yomichan, 10ten, etc), then hover and more the cursor from the beginning to the end of the sentence would be the most thorough lookup. It may still miss some grammar or contractions, though. Also, as Yomitan shows multiple translations at a time, you’ll have to judge the results that work best for the overall sentence.
https://ichi.moe may parse a sentence better than jisho.org. Still, both might not tell alternative vocabulary entries/readings, nor alternative segmenting of the sentence.
I don’t really have experience of AI options, like ChatGPT, and possibly others.
Satori Reader could be a nice reading platform for you. They break down every single word and grammar structure within the specific context (afaik everything is manually written) plus every text is read by a native (which you can replay between normal speed and very slow for every single sentence or the whole story - they’re short), so you don’t have to rely on your own (maybe wrong) pronunciations and can parrot theirs. They have a free version, where you can read a few selected stories.
They also have an SRS system too so you could add new vocab there to review it. But you may need to pay attention to not overwhelm yourself with too many learning sources.
Aaand you can link your WaniKani API to choose if you see no furigana over the kanji you learned here or not at all and so on.
The paid version costs up to $9 per month, but I think it’s a good value-for-money ratio considering their high requirements for authors (less “only written forms”, more “as one would speak” iirc) and the implemented manually written information.
Of course, the most obvious advice would be to firstly build a vocab knowledge of a few words, let’s say at least 500? If you just started with learning Japanese, you may not want to start reading for now but first learn some more of the most common words - here on WaniKani with Kanji or in general.
But whatever way you choose for your personal learning path: have fun with it! As long as you stick to learn some new bits here and there you will make progress!
