Hi, when you would measure the level of NHK News Easy articles to the JLPT level, what kind of level would it be? (From the easier ones to the harder)
I think that it is something like N3 to halfway of N2 Level but can't tell it because actually never took one of these tests.

[Zgarbas]

Most are around N4 level, some around N3.

Zgarbas Wrote:Most are around N4 level, some around N3.

I dunno, I'd say they have a greater range. The grammar is butt easy, and they use short sentences, but they also introduce some fairly high-level vocabulary.

From today: 安倍総理大臣と会議を行う予定の迎賓館の周りには、車をチェックする所ができました。

You're probably not going to see that on N3, and certainly not N4. I'd say the articles are solid N3+. If they were longer, they could be N2.

[Zgarbas]

Usually for every tough vocab term they have explanation pop-ups, and when you *do* have something that's more difficult then it's also really common (Abesouridaijin).

I can manage to get through the few articles I've read on that site after finishing the Genki series (at least in terms of grammar). Generally I do a fair amount of dictionary lookups for vocab. but if I remember right there is furigana over most things so if I don't understand a word it was likely because I was too lazy to look it up

Zgarbas Wrote:Usually for every tough vocab term they have explanation pop-ups, and when you *do* have something that's more difficult then it's also really common (Abesouridaijin).

It's still well above N4 level which was his point.

I didn't want to create a new thread for this so I just did a search for NHK News. Can anyone tell me if the audio is an actual person or if it's a text to speech program? I honestly can't tell because it's not great quality and very monotone. I'd rather not learn from a text to speech program to be honest.

egoplant Wrote:I didn't want to create a new thread for this so I just did a search for NHK News. Can anyone tell me if the audio is an actual person or if it's a text to speech program? I honestly can't tell because it's not great quality and very monotone. I'd rather not learn from a text to speech program to be honest.

It's text to speech, but it's pretty good and, considering there aren't any other recordings for it, it can be useful if you need it.

I have another question, how come they delete all their articles that are a few days old?

[Zgarbas]

They don't. If you scroll down to the calendar you can see all articles posted in one week (just click 前へ to see older ones). There are only a few weeks worth, but given how they're news articles old ones aren't going to be relevant anyway.

Zgarbas Wrote:They don't. If you scroll down to the calendar you can see all articles posted in one week (just click 前へ to see older ones). There are only a few weeks worth, but given how they're news articles old ones aren't going to be relevant anyway.

If you look at local news, like http://www3.nhk.or.jp/lnews/morioka/ for example, everything seems to get deleted after about 24 hours.

[RawToast]

If you want more articles there should be an archive of old stories with mp3s in bounaparte's resources thread:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840