Reading Straightforward Japanese?

Alright, im extremely confused about this, and I would love some explanation plz

Unlike English, Japanese tends to not have spaces and have a completely straightforward sentence, but how in the world, do you read it when you can see a complete mess of combination of words.

Heres one example of what I mean (just an example):


Lets say "Da, wa, we, aw, we, et, ti, ia, ed" are syllable 2ords.


Now, heres an example of a sentence:

"Awetiawawawetiawet"


Do you see how much "word" combos you can just pick out and form a complete word than it should be in the sentence. Its the same thing for japanese for me, an array of different japanese words all clumped together, and its hard to read.

So, if any of you have some tips or explanation, I would love to accept help ^_^

yoroshiku onegaishimasu <3

Rabby said:

Unlike English, Japanese tends to not have spaces and have a completely straightforward sentence, but how in the world, do you read it when you can see a complete mess of combination of words.

Click to expand...

I am only a learner ... I find it almost impossible to read long and complicated sentences written in all kana with no spaces. The kanji characters are invaluable for showing you where word boundaries fall. I believe even native speakers can find it tedious to read all-kana text of any length.

Rabby said:

Alright, im extremely confused about this, and I would love some explanation plz

Unlike English, Japanese tends to not have spaces and have a completely straightforward sentence, but how in the world, do you read it when you can see a complete mess of combination of words.

Heres one example of what I mean (just an example):


Lets say "Da, wa, we, aw, we, et, ti, ia, ed" are syllable 2ords.


Now, heres an example of a sentence:

"Awetiawawawetiawet"


Do you see how much "word" combos you can just pick out and form a complete word than it should be in the sentence. Its the same thing for japanese for me, an array of different japanese words all clumped together, and its hard to read.

So, if any of you have some tips or explanation, I would love to accept help ^_^

yoroshiku onegaishimasu <3

Click to expand...

Can't my previous post be an answer???

What To Do Now? | Japan Forum

Your example doesn't match reality because it doesn't include any grammar. Which of those words are nouns, verbs, adjectives? Where are the particles? If it was just sets of kanji compounds stuck together that might apply (even then there are tricks, see end of post). I very rarely run into cases where I can't parse (split up) a sentence, although I run into unfamiliar vocabulary all the time.

Here's more like reality. I've replaced all the kanji in a sentence with letters:
ABがCにDまれたEFのGHがIJにKり、LMNOPQでRSいでTつかっている。

Here's parsing it, first attempt - parts of speech (noun, verb). The particles and the type of okurigana (hiragana that follow a kanji, as in verbs) tell us (mostly) where the word boundaries lie. It's possible for it to be ambiguous, of course, but it's not nearly as bad as you think when you know the grammar (takes a little practice, of course).

For example Dまれた is going to be "verb in past passive form". EFのGH - two nouns linked by の, it really can't be anything else. The stuff that comes before EF is probably a big modifying clause. All of this can be done in theory without knowing any of the vocabulary in question, although the more you recognise the less ambiguous it will be:

NがNにV-れたNのNがNにVstem、 NでVてVている。

Let's put in only Grade 1 and 2 kanji - I didn't cherry pick this, it's from a randomly chosen newspaper article I thought looked interesting. This is probably equivalent to around N4 (although some of the grammar is higher possibly?)

生BがCにDまれたE海の生Hが今年に入り、日本海OPQでRSいで見つかっている。

Now the whole sentence is not clear but just from this we know it's about this year (今年に入り), and something (whatever 生H is) being found (見つかっている) at some place in or near the sea of Japan (日本海OPQ)

With a dictionary we could look up those words because they're obviously split by particles, of course.

(full sentence for reference: 生態が謎に包まれた深海の生物が今年に入り、日本海側沿岸で相次いで見つかっている。)

Where it tends to get trickier is actually in more casual contexts where particles are dropped, or in kana-heavy text, or in a combination of both.

Other general rules for dealing with long strings of kanji:
1) 2-character and four-character compounds are more common than three-character compounds. Start by splitting two-by-two.
2) Corollary to above: a lot of three character compounds are two-character compounds with a suffix kanji like 化 or 性 if you know those you can guess the split quite easily.
3) Place names are recognisable if you know certain kanji (県、市、村、区 etc). Again, these act as suffixes so can be used to split stuff up.