JPRead a bunch from my manga, 寄生獣, first volume. 寄生獣第１巻 page 62/224. Brain is now チタタプ (chitatap, an ainu recipe consisting of various animal bits ground up in a soup).
The Japanese verbal system is actually pretty complex. Today I learned there's a verbal inflection for situations where you need to express "accidentally did so-and-so". So here's how it works. first you pick the verb, let's say 食う (to eat). then you put it in the "did do" tense thingy: 食って. then you add しまう conjugated in the correct tense: しまった. then you paste these two together and get the final logical product: 食ってしまった. fuse the sounds around a little bit and you get spoken japanese: 食っちまった (I accidentally ate it).
This could stand as a complete sentence in Japanese. The only requirement for a sentence in Japanese is the verb.
From that, I think I understand why Korean learners are having such a hellish time learning that language. Sometimes you just have no idea if sounds trailing the verb are a modification at the phonetic level (slurry speech or slang), or a proper inflection form you've not learned yet. Sometimes it's also both, and you're left missing a huge part of the sentence's meaning (remember the base requirement of the sentence is a verb).
-- Vocab
I'm getting a lot better at recognizing pure Japanese words from their Chinese counterparts. For an example: 数 can be [sy:] or [kazy]. Very ancient Japanese did not have vowel length distinction, from what I understand. When the Chinese words made their way into the language very frequently they kept long vowels and hissy sounds like suu juu chuu etc. These also tend to be monosyllabic. I dug around a little bit, and Chinese itself is probably related to Tibetan and Burmese languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibeto-Burman_languagesThe bulk of the inventory in Japanese looks like Wu Chinese. I might read up some more into the SEA origins of Chinese, it's interesting enough for me.