みんあさん、こんばんは！
(Good evening, everyone)

It has been a really long time, and you have my apologies. ごめんなさい！

I am still up to my eyeballs editing and haven't had a lot of opportunities to study.

But I will still list some "baby" sentences. These seem really simple, and they are, but by learning particals later, we will be able to connect them, and make larger ones. Those are really very important. Learning English as a child, you learned by 'baby' sentences. I promise, your first sentence was not - "Maternal figure, are we going to partake of the afternoon meal in a somewhat short amount of time?"

So, here we go. I will write each sentence twice. Once with kanji, once without. When you start to familiarize yourself with kanji, you will see how it makes Japanese... easier to read. As a language that uses no spaces between their words, this can bee seen as breaking up the sentence into... manageable bites.

Let's see it in action. And I will be using the polite version of the verbs. You wouldn't necessarily use this when talking with friends, but I would rather err on the side of caution. When I finally get to Japan, I won't have any friends, really, so I would rather start off with polite, as to not offend anyone.

わたしはほんをよみます <--- Hiragana only
The sentence reads "I book read." ALL Japanese sentences end with the verb. ALL. Unless there is a clause, that is something I am still working on.
That sentence is perfectly readable, but read a lot of that, and your eyes sort of go crossed.

私は本を読みます
This is the exact same sentence as above. Word for word. But the use of Kanji breaks up the hiragana into... bite-sized pieces.

わたし =(I) =  私
ほん = (book) 本
よみ = (read, currently reading) 読み

I book read.

Now a TINY little explanation as to particles. What is a particle, you ask? Particles are little pieces of Hiragana that tells you information about the sentence. It is what allows all the words (except for the verb) to be mixed up and the sentence still makes sense.

In the sentence above, there are two particles.
は and を
This は is pronounced the same as わ. which would be??? Yes! Wa. This particle is VERY common and it points to the topic of the sentence. It is called the topic marker. 私, in this case, is the subject.

を is the object marker. It points to the object that is receiving the action of the verb. Again, it's very common.

水を飲みます
みずをのみます
water drink. みず = 水 = water. を object marker のみます = 飲みます = drink. The を comes after the water, because it is the thing receiving the action.

I will write out some more sentences and post them tonight.

Oh! Before I forget, I conjugated the verbs to polite form. The "ます" is what makes the sentence polite.
The plain form of read is よむ (読む)

This guy explains verb conjugation FAR better than I can. The first link will show how to conjugate, the second shows the polite form.
They are short, but makes things SO clear.
Verb groups.  It's easier than you think.
The Masu form Again, easier than you think. Masu form is incredibly easy to learn.

Happy learning!