I am teaching myself Japanese with the aid of beginners textbooks and internet
resources. I have learnt to read both the hiragana and katakana alphabets
(yay!) I felt super excited and started trying to read everything I could... I
bought little manga books intended for _very_ young children, and thought I
could just use translators to translate what I was now reading. However, not
knowing where words start or end I cannot differentiate actual sentences from
just a jumble of sounds :-(

What should I do to understand what I'm reading?
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comprehension
Separating words in a sentence
If you work through a textbook, the vocabulary you need should be built up
from the ground. Once you know some sentence structure, this should be enough
to figure out word boundaries in elementary picture books, which allows you to
look up words in any dictionary.

Some books for pre-school children actually do put spaces between words for
better readability, so could start with that. (For example, you may know [すてきな
三にんぐみ](http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%99%E3%81%A6%E3%81%8D%E3%81%AA%E4%B8%89%E3%81%AB%E3%82%93%E3%81%90%E3%81%BF-%E3%83%88%E3%83%9F%E3%83%BC-%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B2%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC/dp/4033270205/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425986080&sr=8-1&keywords=%E3%81%99%E3%81%A6%E3%81%8D%E3%81%AA%E4%B8%89%E3%81%AB%E3%82%93%E3%81%90%E3%81%BF),
which has spaces and is translated using only katakana & hiragana.)

Generally, I think it's a great idea to try to read children's books, but be
aware that these are intended for children who are already fluent in spoken
Japanese. At times you may have trouble finding words, even if you know how
they are spelled in kana (which is why I would suggest you start with a book
you know well in your native language).
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Start with [Tae Kim](http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar), read up to
Advanced section, stop. His format is flawed and he doesn't explain a lot of
things that he should and tailors his stuff mostly to speaking as opposed to
reading but it's totally fine as a start. A universal screwdriver, of sorts.

Then:

[http://www.amazon.com/A-Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-
Grammar/dp/4789004546](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/4789004546) +
Intermediate / Advanced variants.

Get these three, they'll cover a lot of things Tae Kim didn't. Keep reading
and re-reading them, writing out sentences for practice etc.

**MOST IMPORTANTLY, HAVE FUN** Find something you'd LOVE to read/watch (books,
Yotsuba, TV drama, tentacle pron whatever) to motivate you, doesn't matter how
advanced - the point is to motivate you and if you like it enough you'll
persevere with it anyway. VNs (visual novels) are the perfect learning method
IMO (assuming you can handle the occasional icky bits) as you can parse their
text into text editors and rip voice audio to Anki to grind your listening
skills.

Grow your anki deck.

Don't overestimate the difficulty of learning. It's a language learnable by
kids and people with far, far below average intellect (as for the argument
that kids learn languages easier, I myself find learning languages a lot
easier in my late 20s compared to my younger self). Harder than learning
another European language for a European, yes, but not nearly as hard as, say,
becoming proficient at a sport or a musical instrument.

Have fun!
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I agree with Earthliŋ's answer, particularly about looking for books with
spaces between words, but I'd like to add a few more thoughts and point out
some specific issues.

There are different levels books aimed for very young children. First there
are baby books, for children who are just learning words. These will usually
just have one or two words with each picture, e.g., かー and/or ぶーぶー. The first
is just the word for car, and the second is the sound it makes. In general,
Japanese children's books use a lot of onomatopoeia, most of which can be
found in dictionaries, but in simple cases you can guess the meaning from
context. These should not be too hard to read.

However, baby books are probably not super interesting. A big issue when
reading simple story books, in addition to a lot of vocabulary you wouldn't
learn in introductory textbooks, is the use of slang and things like word
play. First, most (but not all) introductions to Japanese start off by
teaching you polite Japanese, which is not how kids learn (familiar, casual
Japanese). So kids books will use a lot of casual Japanese. Second, there's a
lot of slang in spoken Japanese, just like in English, and this will appear in
kids books as well. (e.g., しています meaning "is doing" is している in normal casual
Japanese, but often pronounced and written as してる.)

As for finding gaps between words, even as you progress it takes effort. One
thing you could do is use a good online dictionary (or tools like rikai-chan),
preferably one that will recognize verb conjugations, as you will run into a
lot of conjugated verbs you need to work to try out various possibilities to
find the root of (I think jisho.org, at least the beta version, may do this
for you.) This helps, but you may still need to try several possibilities to
figure out what the words are. It is also much easier to determine where words
begin and end when you have a good sense of the grammar, which you'll need to
make sense of what the words mean when strung together.

Anyway, I think reading children's books is great, but assuming you mean
simple story books, you may either want to wait until you learn a decent
amount of grammar (e.g., maybe after going through 1-2 introductory books) or
start with bilingual children's books. There are a lot of these available in
Japan (though I don't know if they'll be easy for you to get) aimed at
teaching Japanese kids English from a young age.

I probably didn't start reading children's books until covering roughly 1-2
semesters of Japanese, and even then learning to read children's books was a
very slow process for me (mainly due to vocab, grammar and slang), so you need
to be patient. Treat it like a research project. Invariably, there will be
times when you get stuck, and then you can ask someone you know or ask on here
for specific questions.
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