How to understand what you are reading in another language

Maybe you have already gone through the experience of getting frustrated for not being able to understand the language you are studying. You do what your workbook or your teacher asks, but you simply cannot understand what you want. You have memorized a lot of vocabulary and even consider that you have a good grammar base, and then you think that the problem is with you.

In this article, we will try to show you what might be causing you not to understand what you read in the language you are studying. But before we try to give you clues, let’s first separate two concepts.

Listening Comprehension vs Reading Comprehension

First, you must know which of them you are having difficulty with so that you can know where to put your energy. As the name itself says “listening,” it means you understand through sounds, and “reading,” through texts. In most cases, there is a great difficulty in listening comprehension, since to understand what is being said, you have possibly seen it before in written form, even if it was in your study material, of course, if it is not your native language.

Based on this, to be able to read, it is assumed:

• Vocabulary;
• Understanding of various structures;
• Fundamental knowledge of at least the main grammars;
• And practice!

And with practice, I don’t mean sitting down and doing exercises, but rather reading materials really created by natives like books, e-books, news websites, and other content formats that can train your reading ability. Of course, at first, you will have to start reading books or materials from the course you are taking or the book you are studying to build your base.

Base is a very important factor; it is the foundation that will allow you to migrate to more complex materials created by natives. The problem is the paradox of forever building a “base” and never facing “practice,” which is precisely reading content created by natives. So, having a base, you need to know how to choose something that pleases you and is at least 40% comprehensible.

If it is something almost completely incomprehensible, you will hardly be able to concentrate on what is written. Possibly, at first, most things aimed at reading will be very difficult to understand, but this difficulty will be overcome through the practice of reading and your study of structures, sentences, grammar, and vocabulary. There are also other activities to improve your reading that we will comment on below.

As a note, we are not saying to become an ultra specialist in grammar; just use it to learn something you do not understand, you do not need to know all concepts to understand what is said in the languages. As you get used to the language, automatically, you will start to understand more and more.

Structures of a Language

The structures are really of utmost importance for you to understand the language; they are what make up a sentence, that is, the more familiar you are, the easier it is for you to presume what the idea or meaning of what is being said is. Even without having studied it grammatically in depth.

If you do not understand what structures are, I will give an example in Portuguese:

• I’m going to the corner.
• I’m going to the bakery.
• I’m going to the door.

What do these sentences have in common? “I’m going to …” Right?! These are structures; they are elements within a sentence that follow patterns and can connect to other words or phrases. The trick to developing your speech in the language is to memorize these patterns, because once you know them, when you speak, you will only need to change one or another small element. Just like in the example of [I’m going to], where you just need to add a word that represents a place and sounds good with [the, a]. Let’s see examples in English and Japanese to note that this is inevitable in any language.

In other words, you will overcome your reading difficulty by knowing the meaning of various structures and vocabularies. Vocabulary and grammar you will acquire through study, that is, by taking notes, typing, saving for review, but reading should never be left aside, even with low comprehension.

Reading

Reading has no escape; you will really need to read something, even if little, daily. If you study Japanese, you can start with manga, which usually have simple language, or even watch something SUBTITLED IN JAPANESE, meaning almost everything appears in kanji (ideograms), and watch while reading what is written.

This activity is very powerful because it improves your text interpretation since you have the clear context of what is being said and, on top of that, the sound that comes in the background. Even this activity will require some reading comprehension, as the scenes and subtitles pass very quickly.

Another thing to help train reading is to take articles from the NHK easy news website, which are easy-to-understand news. You can use these articles to practice your reading, or perhaps use a Light Novel that will really require a high level of reading, both in kanji recognition and in text interpretation ability, that is, until then you should develop your reading with what you are capable of.

In summary, that’s it, Study and Practice, both incessantly; there is no magic solution, theoretical knowledge aligned with constant practice is what will truly guarantee results.

Check out our website and repertoire of Japanese language content at japoneclub.com, there you will find a lot of content and various types of classes that will really develop your base to start making great strides in the Japanese language.

I hope you liked this article; if you did, share it and leave your opinion in the comments. Happy studying!