Right. Well, I just started reading a manga in Japanese. I found a system that seems to work reasonably well; reading Japanese first, attempting to loosely translate it, then if I'm unsure, confirming with an English translation I have in the background. All the while having a dictionary practically on speed dial. (Quick search mnemonic in my browser. Endless possibilities.
)
I have to say, it went smoother than I'd imagined and I do get most of it right. Also, the manga is fun, so even if I get a little stuck there's still "entertainment value" in it that prevents me from getting bored/demotivated.
The furigana help a lot, I'd be dead meat without them, I'm afraid I'll have to say-- but all in all: everything went better than expected.
On another note, I still do come across words that I'm not sure of at all - with true/false adjectives, verbs that end in god knows what and a couple of nouns thrown in for good measure, it's not always too easy to find what I'm looking for in a dictionary.
Is there something like (English) wiktionary in Japanese that take most words (or rather, most forms of words) and still "understand" what the root form is?
I think I'm doing a lousy job explaining this, but look at this: if you enter "jumped" into wiktionary, it will gladly spit out an explanation and link you to the "base" form of the word (jump) which is very useful if you're not quite sure what exactly a given word is and does in a sentence.