Following Japanese sentence structure

[prometheus2003]

It occurred to me recently while looking through Japanese the Manga Way that while I'm not yet at this point yet, I'm going to need to stop restructuring everything to make sense in English and adapt my own thinking to follow Japanese sentences naturally. With very simple sentences it's easy enough to reform the words in my head, but as soon as you start adding more advanced grammar it takes a sentence diagram to put it all together.

Again I'm not really too concerned at this point, because I'm still a beginner and I have a ton of vocab to learn first. I'm learning about grammar mainly to become familiar with the concepts as early as I can. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's nothing I can do now to begin to "think in Japanese". For example, I'd like to train myself to expect subject-object-verb sentence compositions, instead of always jumping ahead to the verb. I think this would help me to follow the language more easily. Do the experts here have any good methods to accomplish this? I assume that writing and speaking Japanese are both vital, but are there any particularly effective exercises people have discovered?

[WalterWills]

I think that translating lots and lots of sentences, BUT KEEPING THE JAPANESE WORD ORDER, will help you immensely.

For example:

着いたよ！もしかしてJRの方？地下鉄だと出口が色々あるみたい！
Arrived yo! Perhaps JR's direction?　Subway is if exit various there are looks like！

[occultnine]

I remember being real worried about wether or not I could ever "think" in Japanese. But the truth is it will happen in time ( a long time ). The thing to realize is that there is no definite line you can draw; you will continue to "translate" in your head ( after more than 4 years, I still often have to ), but with time the translation gets so fast that you don't notice it. And at some point you will notice it wasn't there. I can remember the first time I was thinking of a Japanese word and I could understand it but for some reason the English equivalent wouldn't come to mind ( it was 責任 )
So what I am saying is that English is your first language and you are not really going to escape it's existence in everything that you do, even learning a second language. Continue dissecting sentences, draw a diagram if you have to, and just get it into your brain any way that you can, which at this point is going to be mainly through English based logic. And have faith that it will come in time.
The only trick I can say is that when you start looking up definitions of Japanese words in Japanese, that will really break you of relying on English, but that takes several years at least.

[Damorith]

I'm writing this from my phone so sorry if I make a mess of mistakes. Sorting out sentence structure is hard for me as well. I'm taking a syntax class along with Japanese and it's helped a bit though. I try not to think of Japanese as SOV instead of SVO anymore because Japanese' structure isn't as simple as moving a few words around. Japanese for one is a null-subject language where as English isn't; meaning the subject isn't always phoentically present in Japanese. Verbs are treated differently as well so train yourself to not think of them as only verbs. Many words like "is", "not", "are", "be", "will", and "could", "have" "might" or "seem" that usually come afer the subject in English are more like verb modifiers/suffixes than individual words in Japanese. These words inbetween the subject and verb in English are what attach to the verb in japanese. They form the tail end of the verb and end the sentence and should be considered before the object when stringing together most sentences.

Edit: this is my first time posting so just wanted to say I love the community here and thanks for having me.