[Audio][Q&A] When Reading, How Should I Deal With Being Able to Understand Every Word in A Sentence Yet Being Unable to Understand the Sentence as a Whole? (Patreon)

FanxyChildxDean asks [question edited for spelling, grammar and flow]:

"So I've been doing AJATT for 7 months now and my vocabulary keeps getting better and better. But lately I've been running into the following "problem": I can read most of the words in a sentence aloud, and know the meanings of all the individual words, yet still fail to fully comprehend the sentence as a whole. 

What should I do?

Should I start paying more attention to the sentences and read slower and more carefully?

Or should I just read read read and immerse more and it will eventually come to me over time the more Japanese I consume? 

Any tips or suggestions?"

Original Question: [Reading Immersion Help : ajatt]

https://bit.ly/2zsOysn

ANSWER:

Words are an abstraction. A useful abstraction, but an abstraction nonetheless. People who use oral-only languages often find it strange to think of individual words (or so I've been told both in books and in person [once by a European-American who learned Navajo to a high level; another time by a boy whose first language from ages 0 to 9 was French before he moved to Ohio and learned English -- his French remained vestigial and largely unlettered: he thought more in set phrases and strings of words than in what we would call individual "dicitonary" words]).

So to then take words (an abstraction) and then put them together and assume you'll know what they'll mean, is to pile abstraction onto abstraction and mix it with hope.

Now, happily enough, this process often works out. But there are also plenty of times when it doesn't.

Run into the middle of street. Find an "intermediate-level" English speaker, preferably one who doesn't speak any other Germanic language at all. Ask them what the phrase "who put you up to this?" means.

They'll probably be able to tell you what all the individual words mean yet remain quite unable to explain the whole.

Language is patterns. Some of these patterns are visible if we just know individual words. Many are not. How to come to grips with them? Not by slowing down and overthinking. A language isn't a mathematical proof. You're not going to take a bunch of axioms, sprinkle some logic on it and make it make sense.

You'll need more exposure, more reading, more hearing, more listening, more watching, more looking up. It'll come to you. Keep going. Keep immersing. Keep SRSing.