Just read an interesting article from Neuroscience.
From the article: “Each of these older models identifies a distinct culprit for frustrated comprehension: difficulty in expectation and difficulty in memory retrieval. We experience difficulty in expectation when a sentence doesn’t easily allow us to anticipate its upcoming words.
We experience difficulty in memory retrieval when we have a hard time tracking a sentence featuring a complex structure of embedded clauses…”
The article didn’t seem to offer any suggestions on how to more efficiently bridge the gap in comprehension.
For those who have dealt with complex sentences, what was your strategy for making the sentence more comprehensible?
Did you grind through? Do grammar look ups? Another strategy?
How long did it take for your strategy to work in improving your comprehension?
The sentence mode + translate key was a godsend for me in the beginning. Like getting the meaning of the sentence and then able to look and parse the segments made a lot of content that was beyond my ability at the time more comprehensible and much less frustrating. I did this for a full year of really hitting that translate key until the Spring 2022 LingQ update broke the sentence mode for me for a couple of months and I had to abruptly wean myself off.
After that, I improved and now just deal with the ambiguity and blaze through (sometimes I skim a translation of a chapter before I read it). Recently I’ve switched to using a monolingual dictionary for looks ups and occasionally I will translate the entry back into english if I’m impatient or still not gettting it.
Chinese is very “chunky” so it’s a matter of seeing what chunk didn’t make sense and then being able to place those pieces into the correct slot to get the overall picture - I’m sure it would work for other languages though.
When you aren’t using LingQ, I highly recommend downloading the DeepL app and making a hot key /shortcut. It’s really great for websites and watching shows with soft coded subtitles.
Interesting article, but take the results as just an interesting piece of news. It’s a predictive model of how complex a sentence is, which doesn’t really relate to us too much.
“For those who have dealt with complex sentences, what was your strategy for making the sentence more comprehensible?
Did you grind through? Do grammar look ups? Another strategy?
How long did it take for your strategy to work in improving your comprehension?”
Probably all of the above.
The sentence is often complex because of its grammar. For this reason, if you hare having lots of difficulty in this department, you have to spend some time studying it. This includes various tenses, which you don’t have in your native language, or particles, the list goes on. You don’t have to fully memorise all the rules, but having a basic idea of how it functions and what it does goes a long way.
Keep in mind that there is not always a direct translation for words. These words may be part of a phrase, so you can create a lingQ for that phrase. Don’t translate word by word, if you can help it, especially as your level progresses.
‘Grinding through’ is also important, as you have to intuitively understand the sentence and this only comes with lots of experience.
As @TofuMeow said, sentence by sentence translation can really help with this. Those pesky particles and untranslatable individual words become more clear in the context of the whole sentence. Over time, with enough experience, you will need the sentence translation less and less.
Understand that there are even complicated sentences for natives, such as the complicated sentence in the article, so don’t beat yourself up about those.
I have found La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes to be difficult. I am currently reading another book in the meantime with plans to come back to Lazarillo later. I was thinking that when I was stronger in the language, it would be easier to tackle. When I come back to Lazarillo, I’ll use some of your suggestions.