I am not sure exactly what the terminology is here. I often find that when studying a foreign language through example sentences, I am unable to identify when a particular grammar pattern has "finished" and when another one begins.
A simple example might be something like the english sentence
he will run
The words "will" and "run" each have individual meanings, but in this specific sentence they really convey the future tense. If you were unfamiliar with the future tense you might look at this sentence and try to understand the meaning of each word individually. How would you know to look at the last two words as a single grammar pattern?
For a more illustrative example, suppose I read the Japanese phrase
泣いている
This could be interpreted as a conjunction:
泣いて いる - "I cry and exist",
but this would be weird, the entire phrase really means "I am crying", and is best conceptualised as a single conjugation. It seems as though you would need prior knowledge of the grammatical patterns in question in order to know that "泣いて" in this context isn't actually the entire conjugation of the verb "to cry".
How would a beginner even know that the two options I gave were the only ones? What is stopping
泣い ている
or
泣 いている
from being correct.
Of course this is also an issue in other languages. I have encountered it in Greek as well. Japanese seems like the easiest to draw examples from here because its agglutinative nature and lack of spacing between "words" makes this kind of delineation much harder.
To summarise: When unfamiliar with the grammar patterns it seems almost impossible to even pick out what needs to be searched for when learning by reading. You can't just search up the entire sentence because that wouldn't give you any general information, but then you need to somehow decide what parts to cut out and search up individually.
I am wondering if anyone has any tips for identifying these "individual grammatical units" in practice.
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