How do I break down sentences to understand them better?

[hard plank]

Hi everyone! I hope you all are having a good week. I've recently tried to pick up reading Manga but I've been having a lot of trouble with understanding anything. Currently im trying to read Oyasumi Punpun, but it feels like almost every sentence I just have no idea whats being said. It honestly takes me incredibly long to read even just one panel, and even after looking most things up the sentence ,a lot of times, still doesn't make any sense. Currently, I'm comfortable with seeing all the particles and knowing relatively what they do, but the different conjugations really trouble me and just make the whole sentence feel confusing.

Does anyone have any tips that really helped them out when they first started reading? Or what things I can do to break down these sentences and actually understand what is happening inside of them? Would love some thoughts!

Like a sentence like this for example. I get a little bit of what they might be saying. But it still doesn't really make that much sense, and I get that if I don't understand the sentence in like 20 seconds I should just move on, but also like most of the sentences are like this and I really end up not really getting anything...

Some times I do get some sentences I understand fairly well though.

[cloud marten]

Learnnatively scores this manga as relatively more difficult, probably more difficult than what i would recommend someone just starting out reading. Here's the site https://learnnatively.com/

It might be a good idea to start out with manga that is on the easier end of the spectrum, unless you're having a really good time with this one.

Also, i don't know if you are using mokuro to process manga (https://github.com/kha-white/mokuro) but if you're not yet, i would recommend it since it uses OCR to process the text and make it selectable (you can use yomichan).

Reading more difficult content that nevertheless interests you is absolutely something you can do, but if the majority of sentences are of the sort where you look up words and still can't piece together what's going on, it might not be the most efficient choice of content for you right now. Picking content where the density of sentences in your reach is higher will keep you moving the bar up

And in the meantime you can keep perusing a grammar guide if you're using one to put the knowledge of things like verb conjugations in your head and you have a chance to recall it in your immersion content

[hard plank]

I've been reading a little bit of tae kims but its pretty tough to recall all of the things im reading from it. I guess I should just keep rereading it till it sticks. But yea this manga has been super tough, I just chose it kind of randomly cause I saw it on this Jo Mako list and it said it wasn't too difficult. But my reading level probably isn't there yet.

I'll see if I can find some easier stuff to read. I want to do more reading because I feel like it would speed up my ability to understand other mediums like games or anime etc.

[cloud marten]

its definitely great for intensive immersion, learning vocabulary, and dissecting grammatical structures since its so easy to stop, go back, and really ask yourself what something means and you don't have to deal with added ambiguity from undertrained ears.

just cause i remember it helping me a lot, id recommend watching cure dolly's verb conjugation video if you haven't seen it.
iirc ive sent messages in this server praising it as like one of the most helpful videos i ever watched lol

https://youtu.be/FhyrskGBKHE?si=2ErmSbEe54sj-13i

[hard plank]

Heyyyy I like the cure dolly videos. I haven't seen this one I'll definitly check it out