Hi, can anyone help point me towards Japanese lessons based on news and politics? Ideally, I’m looking for something with audio, and something at Beginner 2 level. I’ve done hardly any grammar study (embarrassed smile), and right now am mainly concentrating on getting my vocab and reading skills up.
I’ve tried searching the site, but a lot of the stuff is too advanced for me.
I like the NHK Easy News site, but the audio is locked down to the site, which is not ideal for me, and importing it is a pain because of the furigana.
To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot of audio with transcript news and politics content that I’ve been able to find for Japanese. This site might be your best option: http://newsinslowjapanese.com/
Tokyo MX has a YouTube account that they upload short news clips to. Most of the videos have a transcript for the intro to the news clip but it isn’t exact and it is typically only the intro. They put links to the transcript in the description of the video.
Since audio with a transcript is rather hard to find, I would suggest that you concentrate reading and watching videos on a specific news topic or category. At least then you will have a better chance of running into vocabulary you are already familiar with when they talk about that topic. If you’re not sure which category to start with, I suggest reading the weather. It might not be the most exciting thing to read about but pretty much every news broadcast has a weather report. Also, the vocabulary is probably the most repetitive out of all of the news topics you could pick. There are only so many ways you can say it’s going to rain.
And since I suggested reading the weather… here is a place you can go to do just that:
NHK also has a podcast that is updated multiple times a day called NHKラジオニュース. It basically has a bunch of shorter news updates that are around 10-15 minutes long and then one newscast that is about an hour long. The shorter newscasts typically have weather reports at the end of them. This is also a good way for practicing listening to numbers, something I’m admittedly bad at. Weather reports have lots of numbers.
Thanks so much for the replies, guys. I’ve had a quick peek at News in Slow Japanese, looks very useful, especially as the narrator records both a slow and a fast version. Much of the language is still a bit too much for me, but it’s good to challenge myself. Plus, it’s good to have a native voice, rather than the automated voice on NHK Easy Web.
That FNN site is awesome. Lots of work and lots of reading, but the transcripts are an awesome resource!
Thanks for the link dooo. I’ve gone on FNN’s site before but I didn’t know they uploaded to YouTube. That makes it much easier to study with LingQ. I glanced over a few videos and the transcripts look to complete and mostly exact.
Btw, does anybody know why Japanese newscasters speak with a polite form and then the transcripts are always using a more neutral form? ie. います → いる Pretty much all the news networks seem to do that.