I just immersed more and then got better at parsing, just read more and your brain will get used to it

https://learnjapanese.moe/readingtips/#my-comprehension-tip

Bunsuke's video on how to improve reading

Basically pay the most attention to the nouns and verbs in a sentence 

Note mentally places where a clause ends: connecting words (verb+と,けれど etc), connecting verb or adjective forms. Translate roughly /get the meaning of each clause, and try to make sense of them together.

Commas are not so much indicators of syntactical structure as in English, as they are indicators of a pause. If you're good at parsing spoken speech, that could help.

Sometimes there's a bit of a curve ball, like "xyzは, abcが lots of verbs and clauses, finite verb." The はpart is probably connected to the verb outside of abcが's area of influence, often the finite one.

But basically to round it up: look for indicators of the end of a clause. When you know the verbs/adjectives/nouns+copula who are the "the leaders" of their clause and the area of their influence, you figure out relationships between them. Draw a few arrows if you have to.

It'll take time to get used to it. Don't get too discouraged though because the book on LearnNatively https://learnnatively.com/series/f0ca156e38/ is around N2 level and there are easier books to start with. JPDB can be quite inaccurate at times

Part of the challenge with long Japanese sentences is that clauses are nested rather than linear (as in English). Chained-together English clauses are like semi-independent thought fragments, like this:

「・・・」、「・・・」、「・・・」。

While nested together Japanese clauses can often be more like

『・・・は「・・・が（・・・に・・・)」』for example, where each one is nested inside the previous one. Your brain is just not used to untangling information packaged in this way, at least not at a reasonable speed.

Another part of the challenge is the rather simple issue of word order. It's easy enough to figure out Japanese word order in short, conversational sentences, but the longer the sentence gets, the easier it is to lose the train of thought. If you encounter a sentence that you're struggling with, one trick I found works is to read it first in the correct order, then read it backwards. Reading it backwards will deliver the information in an order that your brain is used to receiving it, and you'll be surprised how much more sense it makes.

Finally, I think reading speed really plays into things and this is true of any language not just Japanese. The longer the sentence is, the more tokens your brain has to basically cache until you get to the end of the sentence. In your native language, reading is basically instantaneous—you don't read words per se, you identify them as images in fractions of a second, so you may only be holding on to this information for a second or two by the time you reach the end. But in Japanese when you are still reading at a JSL speed, you are forcing your brain to retain all this information for much longer than it would have to in English, leading to way more instances of forgetting what this sentence is even about in the first place. By the time you finally make it to the final verb, you're like "wait what even was the は again?" Sadly the only way to overcome that is to just get faster at reading. I know it feels like the worst advice in the world and it doesn't feel helpful to say "Just do the thing you suck at more until you don't suck at it" but sadly that's how language learning is. I am still slow myself but have noticed significant improvement with more and more reading exposure compared to when I picked up my first LN and crashed out hard after page 1. Part of language learning is coming to terms with how insanely underpowered the adult brain is at language learning. But it's ok you're in good company here. All our adult brains suck at this. I'm pretty sure it's biological lol

Short answer: Immerse more and it will sort itself out.

Few tips. I assume you are mining? Mine sentence cards that contain one piece of grammar that you don't know, just treat them as words. If you normally mine words and not sentences I would definitely recommend mining grammar as sentence cards.

I noticed that after I had immersed a lot in audio only content, the voice in my head could also read way more fluently which made the parsing much easier, so when I read your sentence in my head it goes like this "何事にも一生懸命に取り組んでいる人を見ると..尊敬の念を抱くし..........自分もそうありたいと思うけれど、 ..それにしても..父さんの場合は上限を余裕で突破している"
Kinda hard to explain but my brain knows where to pause for a bit to understand the meaning, and I felt like audio immersion was greatly beneficial for this. Don't get me wrong it will be hard in the beginning no matter what because you probably don't even know all the words yet.

I also think that when reading light novels, getting the audiobook and making sentence cards with audio was helpful for reading smoothly but that might be too much effort to some.

Like you said you should not be using AI to check every sentence, I do think it is fine to do every once in a while if it does not disrupt getting actual input time done every day.

PS. JPDB is no longer updated but this website is! https://jiten.moe/

How you go about parsing stuff like this, is basically just like the other guy said, but maybe in a different manner.

1000 hours is an understatement. You really need a lot of experience. A lot meaning, really a lot. Not 100, but 1000+ hours of trying and trying and trying.

This means you will get this feeling that you are horrible, all the damn time. That person was not joking about hours. Because I know exactly how it feels and what he means.

How do you get experience? By keep trying. There is no magic trick that magically makes it just happen.

Slowly you will learn more vocabulary + better understanding of grammar + more feeling. All of that is needed to help you parse stuff like this.

If you're already used to immersing in anime or movies, try sort of "reading it out loud in your head", as in trying to hear the sentence with intonation how it sounds most natural. This can help you parse sentence chunks better, specially in stuff structured like dialogue, like your example. Other than that, just keep immersing. It's ok to move on if you grasp only the general meaning, you don't have to understand the whole structure

I think like any skill, or subset of skill (in this case, understanding longer sentences), the only way to truly improve on them is to just practice more, i.e. read more.

Personally I switched from anime/manga to novels specifically because I wanted to get some experience with longer sentences.

It's hard early on to keep in your head everything what you need to remember to comprehend one of these sentences, but hopefully the preceding and following sentences can add context. Aside from that, I focused on just understanding the individual clauses. Over time eventually I just naturally started to connect them together in longer bits.

However, even at the point where I'm at, I can't parse the specific details or nuances that a native, a more advanced learner, or AI can. I find trying to look up a translation, or an AI parse of it to be very demotivating in that it's training me to just want to accept 100% comprehension. When in reality, it'll be quite a bit less than that - the moment that I understand sentences 100% at that point I've pretty much completed learning what I can from that sentence (aside from knowing how to read it faster).

Embracing some level of ambiguity, relying on other sentences for context, and only focusing on specific chunks of a sentence you can at a time will eventually work out into higher natural comprehension.

Are you studying grammar? Grammar is how to you learn how to parse, approach syntax, and separate ideas.

Learn the signal words and what kind of functions they have. I have a txt file still from when I started and when I read I would just have it open for a while and look at it. If I saw a new signal word (and still if I see one), I just add it to the category

I'm not eng-nat, so when I learned about signal words in school I only learned the terms in my native language. But I can literally translate them into english. I have off the top of my head

• cause-consequence: Because thing a happens, thing b happens

• conclusive/summarize: In the end, blah blah blah / Basicallly blah blah blah

• opposite: really don't know the english word, "but" is the perfect word as an example. Person X wanted to do A, but chose to do B

Just like in english, if a japanese sentence is really long it often just has a signal word in it that connects multiple parts of the sentence. Learn what the japanese signal words signal, learn to recognize them, and once you see one copy-paste the sentence into word or any text-editor and see how it connects these parts

Also I just notice you gave an example. Perfect in that case, I believe these are the signal words:

と: can have a lot of uses. One is conditional, so "if"

けれど: opposition

それにしても: opposition

そうと思う can also be counted as a signal word. But I see it as different since it's more like quotes than splitting a sentence into parts.

I have 2 ways of dealing with long sentences.

First, just get a general idea based on what kanji you see in there and move on, that helps with reading speed.

Second, read carefully, slowly and aim at looking up not the unfamiliar words but at what these new words come with (the surroundings) - aim for the whole chunk. It is very common in any language to have chunks that hold meaning. You most likely fail to understand long sentences because you know words, but not phrases.

Alternatively ask gpt to simplify the sentence for you so it is easier to understand, not translation but simplification in Japanese.

I've read 5 LNs and I'm making progress but I still get lost pretty easily. Even smaller sentences can pack in a lot of grammar! For now I can get the nouns and the verb stems pretty well, I get a general idea of subjects and objects but the more subtle points are harder.

As I learn more grammar it has gotten better. But also as I read more, the more I want to learn grammar, so it has been a virtuous circle.

Don't expect to be comfortable for a while. Ambiguity will be with you for a long time. You aren't broken or stupid, it's just the process.

In this case, you could identify the phrases. Then, you should be able to understand it, as it is essentially multiple sentences.

1)何事にも一生懸命に取り組んでいる

• 人

= a modified noun, People/Someone who does their best with something

2) (そんな)人を見ると尊敬の念を抱く

= I harbor a sense of respect when I see such a person

し and

3) 自分もそうありたいと思う

= I feel I'd like to be that way, too

けれど、but

4) それにしても even so

父さんの場合は上限を余裕で突破している

= In the case of my father, he's easily breaking the limit

I'd translate it to something like: "When I see someone doing their best at something, I feel a sense of respect and like I'd like to be that way, but, even so, my dad is on another level."

That said, this is like a reading comprehension strat. You can do this while you're still building your strength, but, eventually, you shouldn't really need to break it down as much as just follow along.

For better or worse, the answer is just read more.

Every medium and genre has its own learning curve because the "conventions" of communication are not the same in a slice of life anime vs a novel vs a white paper vs a tweet vs a financial statement and so forth. Reading a novel is hard for you because, while it's still Japanese, you're sort of learning to read Japanese all over again. You're seeing Japanese used in ways you haven't seen it used before—new sentence structures, new vocabulary, new things being described. You'll get used to that eventually, just like you got used to the shorter and more casual sentences from anime, but it will take time.

I didn't find the sentence you shared so difficult, but whereas you had to look up most words, it was just a few chunks for me... and those parts fit together in the way I expected them to fit together:

• 何事にも一生懸命に取り組んでいる人を見ると → when i see those people ganbatte'ing
• 尊敬の念を抱くし→ i do feel respect
• 自分もそうありたいと思うけれど、→ and i wanna be like that too, but
• それにしても父さんの場合は → when it comes to my father
• 上限を余裕で突破している。→ he's too much / gone beyond that ( i don't know if this is saying "he's gone beyond the level of 一生懸命'ing" or "i feel like I want to be like that, too" )

As you get stuck on more sentences and break down more sentences, you'll gradually build a more intuitive feel for how Japanese sentence structures map to English ones, and then when you're comfortable with that the "map to English" part will become less emphasized and you'll just understand the sentence in Japanese.

The hardest part is the very beginning, so if you stick with it, you'll probably see your reading pace improve a fair bit even just over the course of this first book 🙂

I'm currently going through the suffering of reading and just not understanding shit... sometimes.

There's a reality you gotta accept, and that's that being able to understand a long sentence when there's 5 (or more) words you don't really know/understand how they are used, with grammar you're not yet comfortable with, some slang, casual abbreviations and long verbal conjugations... yeah, you're not gonna understand anything. Oh, and it gets worse, because certain verbs work as a combo/expressions so even if you know them by themselves guess what, they mean something else when combined!

My advice is to just keep going and accept that's how it is, it's just too hard to parse a sentence when you're struggling to even remember what each goddamn kanji pairing means and how it reads, then conjugations are weird, slang makes things harder to recognize... it just sucks.

Some people will recommend to take your time with each individual sentence no matter how long it takes. While that is probably not a bad idea, the problem is it's absolute cancer and unenjoyable, at least for me. I will give sentences a shot, sometimes I'll be like "I can do this" and push through, when I try for a bit and find myself utterly confused juggling with too many unknown stuff (like I'm looking at the sentence and I keep forgetting what each kanji pairing meant/how it was read) I just accept I'm not there yet, check what it says in English and move on.

In my very limited experience I feel things get a lot easier when I'm not reading a sentence that includes several words I don't know, probably because I can put all my effort in understanding what's being said rather than trying to keep it together while learning 5 different words. It's comparable to trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle in your mind. If it's a 200 pieces puzzle and you haven't started it, even if you can see all the pieces it's gonna be impossible, now if it's 200 pieces but 195 are already in place you can probably figure it out.

Someone else linked to a comprehension tip, you'll notice it says to focus on nouns... then verbs, so what are you gonna do when you don't really know any of the 3 nouns being used? Even when you look them up it's just... Jisho gives you 40 possible meanings, you're not sure which one it is, and even if you do you'll probably struggle remembering how it's read so you read the sentence and it's all weird.

The one thing I'm not sure about is that sometimes I'll read a sentence and be like "yeah I know all of what they mean but I'm not 100% sure if I got it right, neither I'm sure about all verb tenses and whatnot but I think I got it", after rechecking I'm usually right, so I suppose that's the ideal outcome? When you just read something and you just "get it".

The clauses advice is amazing, but seriously: Stop using ChatGPT to parse it for you, hit your head against the wall (=take on the challenge) until you understand it. It'll do wonders for your neural circuitry. When you use ChatGPT, you're offloading that neural circuitry learning to the AI. You'll never learn with the same rigour, even if it will feel less frustrating.

I'd also recommend reading manga instead of going straight for LN, having the context of the images will help, and dialogue is also a nice in-between hearing anime lines and reading LN prose.