Since I listen to / read the example Sentences on Bunpro, I found Out, that even when I know the words I’m not able to immediately understand the meaning of the whole Sentence yet.
How Long does it take to understand Sentences without the need to think for several seconds? What are your experiences?
First of all you need to understand the grammar that is being used in the sentence. Like for example in German you can say
Der Hund beißt den Mann.
or
Den Hund beißt der Mann.
where the words are exactly the same (ignoring order) but the meaning is very different.
Once you have the grammar in place, it’s basically a matter of exposure and practice. I can recommend graded readers for that.
I stll struggle even after almost 4 years of studying consistently but I find that with increased grammar knowledge and reading practice, I have improved. So I would say, start with a Satori account and read as much as you can, and just keep reviewing your grammar. I think it gets better with time for sure.
As the others mentioned: where are you in terms of grammar, vs vocabulary? For me, at least, getting started on reading was quite the slog.
As a student, you have to start with the basics, and it’s best if you start with stuff that is easier to comprehend or remember. So I ended up doing a bunch of grammar study with the JLPT levels.
Which was good in the sense that a lot of study materials available for the JLPT, and it gave me a hand-hold on where to start with the giant mountain of grammar. Following JLPT was bad in the sense that you have to get to N3 levels before you can start to read with reasonable comprehension. So it felt like a lot of time spent before getting to a place where I could do what I actually wanted to do.
What worked for me was to combine that grammar study with something that I wanted to read. Things like super beginner Satori Reader stuff or graded readers work wonderfully for some, but were too boring for me. Taking months to hack my way through something far above my level but actually within my realm of interest worked better for me, but that will vary person to person.
It will never be easy, unfortunately. I had to put in many, many, many hours of reading with incredibly low comprehension. It’s something we have to go through. But practice makes perfect, and if I kept at it, my comprehension would take this sudden leap forward after a few months.
It unfortunately never felt like steady, rewarding progress. It felt like tiresomely treading water and failing to making any headway, and then opening up a book one random day and going “why does this suddenly feel so much easier?” I found and find the process challenging, because I have to put in long periods of work where I feel increasingly beaten down about the lack of progress, but apparently some part of my brain is working through it and will install an update sooner or later, as long as I keep pushing on.
So my advice is to keep at it!
I Just bought the satori Reader Abo. I will try to use it alongside Bunpro. With Bunpro I Hope to Finish n3 Grammar until the end of 2026. That means I have 412 Grammar Points left. That should be doable in a year.
It could also be the mindset on how a sentence is comprehended. To me, rather than SOV coming from English SVO mindset, it’s more like
n1p1 + n2p2 + n1p1 + n3p3 + … +nxpx + V。
That is, everything in the front is used to describe the Vです at the back. Descriptions all before action. Though, descriptors might be grouped into clauses, rather than all sequential, just like English grammar.
What I want to say, that it could take time to wrap the head around…
Other than that, I would second the Satori Reader recommendation. After that, getting into real reading, I generally analyze everything into vocabs and phrases which are easier to read about in a dictionary or web search. (And I must also admit that in a way, I don’t like sentences that are too long.)
Not sure about Bunpro, barely tried it, but getting along well with analyzing real sentences, by having real experience, is quite important.
A few thousand reviews if you change your SRS training to be sentences only and not words (you have to read / parse the sentence each time). Depending on your work ethic a few weeks to a few months ? Grammar and vocab are a definite plus but not mandatory. If you go through enough content your brain will do the pattern matching.
Depends on the sentence. I’m sure most Japanese learners could understand 「これはペンです」and there are sentences in English that I have to pause over, and I’ve been speaking it for over half a century.
But in general it’s just a long path of gradually understanding more and more with each passing month of practice. As always it’s a case of doing the thing you want to learn with a mix of repetition and novelty, and how long it takes is measured in hours, well, hundreds of hours, of trying.
I think this is one area where listening and speaking are useful, you can really build up your pattern recognition skills, it’s best to use what you’re trying to learn from Bunpro etc. And while I hate to advertise it, if you can’t / don’t want to get a tutor, try talking to CharGPT in Japanese and getting it to correct you, just don’t believe it’s explanations.
i was just watching it yesterday 
