With Tadoku gone and 6 week Challenge over I propose we do our own competition. It's much more relaxed than them but it might encourage more people to participate.

Rules: Read & listen to NHK News Easy every day (3 articles each day) for a month. Whatever form and combination works for you its fine (I do: listen, read, listen+read), using Rikai* is fine.

Participants: Beginner/Intermediate. Basically everyone who is able to chew his way through the easy version but still struggling with full news articles.

Goal: Motivate yourself to read regularly and check your progress after the challenge is over ie. read the source articles.

How: I've created a spreadsheet to help everyone track their progress, its available here. Just add your nick to the column and pick 'O' from the dropdown if you're done for that day or 'X' if not.

When: We start Monday 17th of December and end on 17th of January.

[Zgarbas]

You should consider making the doc public .

Zgarbas Wrote:You should consider making the doc public .

Sorry about that It should be ok now.

Tadoku's gone? What happened to it?

Also, I discovered the 6 week challenge about 5 weeks too late so I've been itching for something like this. I'm definitely in.

I'm in, too!
I hope I will be able to do it everyday but I will be having finals on January.
Well, 頑張りましょうね！

I've been looking for the motivation to start reading these on a regular basis. This is probably as good of a kick in the butt as I'm going to get.

Ooh, cool idea. I love these mini-challenge ideas.

What a great idea. This is just the kick I need to start reading more.

I'm in.

I'm currently experimenting with different types of language input and I haven't tried news yet so perhaps this is a good opportunity. It might be a bit too hard for my current level but even when I don't understand everything I'll probably pick up lots of useful stuff anyway. I'm in!

mmmm.. this is so tempting!!
I think I'll join in.. only i'll be reading full articles from a newly discovered source: http://shasetsu.ps.land.to/. It has three articles on the same subject, so I hope to see more occurrences of the same words..

I hope I can stick to it!!!

Added my name. Should be fun to try.

walteranderson Wrote:Tadoku's gone? What happened to it?

Also, I discovered the 6 week challenge about 5 weeks too late so I've been itching for something like this. I'm definitely in.

Well I've seen the blog that hosted Tadoku isn't updated for quite some time so I assume the contest is dead too?

I decided to join 6 week (even signed up for twitter just for that purpose) exactly on its last day... so I feel your pain

aniumixie Wrote:I'm in, too!
I hope I will be able to do it everyday but I will be having finals on January.
Well, 頑張りましょうね！

The good thing about NHK you have only 3 articles each day, so you can catch up if you missed one or two days and its not a big deal.

Hey, thurd. From what I've observed, NHK likes to take a few days off sometimes--on the weekends I think. What's the rule on what to do during those times? Read previously read articles?

Hi there thurd, I tried to add my name to your spreadsheet but stuffed it up. Can you fix it?.......goodness me, another horseless carriage just went by my house!

.......sorry.....

hirata Wrote:Hey, thurd. From what I've observed, NHK likes to take a few days off sometimes--on the weekends I think. What's the rule on what to do during those times? Read previously read articles?

I think we'll just take those days off too but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to review those previously read articles

Chiller Wrote:Hi there thurd, I tried to add my name to your spreadsheet but stuffed it up. Can you fix it?.......goodness me, another horseless carriage just went by my house!

.......sorry.....

Done, I've added more columns so we can add more people during the challenge.

thurd Wrote:I think we'll just take those days off too but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to review those previously read articles

Got it. I'll probably read old articles those days to keep the flow going.

I'm ready to go. I've made an Anki deck for the challenge to see how many new words I pick up during the challenge.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a daily reading habit for all of us. Good luck.

Btw, here's how to turn off the furigana:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid169917

I'm in for the challenge, even with my low level of Japanese.
Is it ok to ask questions about the texts here?

One thing I wanted to clarify is:
これは、衆議院の定員の３分の２以上です。
Google translated it: This is more than two-thirds of the capacity of the House of Representatives.

I knew that 以上 means "more than". Therefor ３分の２ is two-thirds?

And ４分の１以下 means "less than one-quarter" ?

r0peJP Wrote:I knew that 以上 means "more than". Therefor ３分の２ is two-thirds?

And ４分の１以下 means "less than one-quarter" ?

Yes thats what it means, its quite an often pattern when reading news.

Edit: Speaking of which, it was a story of insane difficulty for me. I didn't know/recognize most of the words so they all blended together in an absurd mess. At the end of listening I really had no idea about what I've just heard. Reading made things better but only just a little.

Other two were relatively simple, 2-3 unknown words at most so comprehension wasn't a problem.

Well I did today's portion and even though it took quite a bit of time my head hurts (unfortunately it's still very stressing for my brain to read kanji and interpret sentences) it went better than I'd expected. Though I didn't get all of the grammatical patterns and vocab I don't feel like I've missed anything important. The stories were interesting too (I started with the 12月13日 entries). I'm optimistic about keeping this up for a month

This sounds like a great idea, I've always wanted to do one of those reading challenges but since i don't know how to use twitter i couldn't enter lol sometimes i'm social media challenged. And since I just finished my exams I just got back into my Japanese studies, definitely adding my name

I'm up for the challenge. Just signed up ^_^

In!

Count me in, but just to clarify: which date do you mean in the spreadsheet?
The date of the article or the day of reading?
As I see some people have already done 18/12 while only 17/12 is online (or am I missing the latest one?).

Its the day you do the reading. I've already done 18/12 cause of the different time zones. Its 18/12 where I live right now.