Some info that you're likely familiar with, but background for others, maybe.
Tangential, I've found that's something missing in beginning Japanese textbooks. You have to learn kanji (ideographs, more or less) plus hiragana (syllables, for some words, inflections on nouns and verbs), and katakana for foreign words. Japanese does have some punctuation and paragraphs, but not word spacing. Textbooks will start showing you sentences in kana (hiragana and katakana), because that's usually what you learn first. Of course, they write it without word spacing. However, once you start learning kanji or they start including kanji, you release that the kanji marks out phrases, nouns, etc. so it really helps me at least in understanding the sentence.
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Some info that you're likely familiar with, but background for others, maybe.
Tangential, I've found that's something missing in beginning Japanese textbooks. You have to learn kanji (ideographs, more or less) plus hiragana (syllables, for some words, inflections on nouns and verbs), and katakana for foreign words. Japanese does have some punctuation and paragraphs, but not word spacing. Textbooks will start showing you sentences in kana (hiragana and katakana), because that's usually what you learn first. Of course, they write it without word spacing. However, once you start learning kanji or they start including kanji, you release that the kanji marks out phrases, nouns, etc. so it really helps me at least in understanding the sentence.