(2016-06-02, 6:36 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I was wondering how you guys feel about the effectiveness of NHK easy news and the like for those past the N3 vocabulary threshold and done with an N3 level textbook like Tobira.
A lot of people praise it, but I feel the grammar is perhaps a little too simplistic to push someone forward once they've seem most N3 grammar points. The vocabulary seems closer to N3 and every now and then I find an interesting word that I didn't know, but they oversimplify things sometimes by writing the hiragana equivalent of words commonly written in kanji, which can be more confusing than helpful imo (esp. if you've finished RTK).
So is there any point in reading NHK easy news at this level? Despite the fact that I still need exposure to N3 vocabulary, I'm not sure it'd be worth it. Aside from reading whatever you enjoy, is there a more reliable, solid next step? I've been thinking regular NHK news, but I'm not so sure about that since the gap in vocabulary seems to be a little too big to help one absorb N3 vocabulary efficiently. In fact, I think that might be true even when it comes to N2 vocabulary. Maybe TED talks? They do have transcripts.
When I was ready, I simply started reading NHK News, using Rikaisama to help look up words. I also used Rikaisama to save the words to a text file, and then pulled them into Anki for further study. After several months of this, the news got easier, and I was able to progress to a point where I could read many articles with few or no lookups.
It might seem like a mountain of words, but NHK News in particular uses fairly standard, consistent grammar and vocab across all of their news stories.
That said, I would recommend some exposure to N2-level grammar, as the news makes use of a lot of grammar classified as N2 (and occasionally N1).