Help with reading Japanese - no spaces!

[forsberg]

I've studied most of the grammar lessons on Tae Kim's guide to Japanese, and I understand the lessons there.

However, whenever I try to read actual Japanese dialog (example, the Japanese chat thread on here) I am completely clueless because there are no spaces in the sentences, so I don't know where is the start of a new word.

Are there any tips as to how to read Japanese?

[yuriyuri]

The majority of words in kanji will be 1 or 2 kanji in length.

Also you can help split up words by recognising grammar in between the words.

For example:
自民党の長期安定政権

Can be broken down into:
自民 + 党 = Liberal Democratic Party
(I split up 自民 and 党 because 党 can be used as a suffix for a political party)
の - Particle
長期 - Long time period
安定 - Stability
政権 - Political power

This is how I split up words most of the time.

Also the more practise you get with reading the easier it will get over time.

The only things I have trouble reading are place names, like: 軽井沢 (Because I always think of completely the wrong readings and don't realise it's a name)
And of course sometimes I get confused with the names of people, but that's really just because I haven't read very many names.

Edit:
I suddenly just remembered that sometimes you might encounter four-character idiomatic compounds (四字熟語)
These ones aren't split up into 2's (As implied by the name)

A few examples are:
一石二鳥
十人十色
一生懸命
etc.

If you use a dictionary you will find the meaning very easily.
So sometimes it's worth trying to look up all four kanji as a whole "word" instead of breaking it into two.
Unless of course you somehow come across a stupidly rare one like I did one time (口誅筆伐)

But the large majority of the time you can break things down like my example at the top of this post.

[forsberg]

The kanji I have no problems with because I'm chinese. Katakana is ok as well because that's just english. It's the hiragana that's killing me. I've having difficulty figuring out whether the hiragana is part of a conjugation, a particle, or a beginning of a new word that's only written in hiragana.

[yuriyuri]

Originally Posted by forsberg

The kanji I have no problems with because I'm chinese. Katakana is ok as well because that's just english. It's the hiragana that's killing me. I've having difficulty figuring out whether the hiragana is part of a conjugation, a particle, or a beginning of a new word that's only written in hiragana.

Ah I see, sorry I assumed you were having problems reading the Kanji (Just because that's what a lot of people have trouble with)

I started to be able to tell words apart after I learned a lot more grammar (Well actually I learned to at least recognise all of the grammar, even if I didn't understand it when I first started learning).

After that, if I didn't recognise something as grammar then I assumed it to be a normal word.

If there were for whatever reason, two or more words in hiragana stuck together, my confusion would disappear after looking up the words (That is all I could do to solve that problem)

And verb conjugations are easy to tell if you get used to seeing the conjugation patterns.

For example, negative conjugations always either completely cut off the okurigana or change the left most okurigana into the -a sound and end in ない.

So if you have seen the verb 漏れる before, then you see 漏れない you know that the ない is part of the verb conjugation.

The last thing I did to help me learn to read, was to read... A lot.

This is how I did it anyway, but someone else might have better advice

[forsberg]

ok thanks - do you know where is a good place for beginners to read?

There's this one site I found Japanese Stories but it's for children's books so it's not a good reflection of everyday Japanese because of its lack of Kanji.

I want to find a place where I can read in Japanese that's got a nice mix of characters but not as complicated as reading the news on google.co.jp.

[yuriyuri]

Originally Posted by forsberg

ok thanks - do you know where is a good place for beginners to read?

There's this one site I found Japanese Stories but it's for children's books so it's not a good reflection of everyday Japanese because of its lack of Kanji.

I want to find a place where I can read in Japanese that's got a nice mix of characters but not as complicated as reading the news on google.co.jp.

I don't know about simple reading since I have always just read anything I wanted since I started studying, no matter how complicated it was.

But I like this site http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

It is basically full of out of copyright books.
And as far as I know they all display furigana aswell.
When you find a book you want to read using the links you scroll to the bottom of the page, and you have a choice of a link to an html page or a couple of downloads.

For example here is the 吾輩は猫である page:
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148/card789.html

And this is the link to the html page:
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000148...789_14547.html

I like to read through these either looking things up or figuring them out by myself as I go.

[forsberg]

nice! This is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by forsberg

ok thanks - do you know where is a good place for beginners to read?

There's this one site I found Japanese Stories but it's for children's books so it's not a good reflection of everyday Japanese because of its lack of Kanji.

I want to find a place where I can read in Japanese that's got a nice mix of characters but not as complicated as reading the news on google.co.jp.

Google "Hiragana Times." The texts are written normally, then with just hiragana (and I think spaces added), then in romaji with spaces between words.

And then it's actual news stories, so you're not stuck reading Babbity Wabbity or anything.