The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.