To be more active in reading Japanese news articles, let's post articles which are interesting/entertaining/ etc and discuss them here. As long as the article is in Japanese, anything is okay!

Here's mine:

http://news.tbs.co.jp/newseye/tbs_newseye4023053.html

Quote:店のゲームコーナーで遊んでいた２歳の男の子が指を切断する事故がありました。

A 2 year old kid stick his finger in one of those game machines and somehow ended up severing it. You think the kid would stop pulling on his damned finger when he noticed it was coming loose, right?

Okay. Post yours, and your thoughts.

Meh, thanks for this thread. Great idea.

I heard that "5 minutes away tale" many times. It was really only 5 minutes? It was a 2yo boy, he should be not away from his mother's sight for not even a second.

Cool thread! And lovely article, are all the articles on that site the same? I mean not only do you get a good article, it's basically the script to the news clip! So you can listen to the clip, then read the parts you didn't understand and mine it.

I like the tbs news site, the problem is that I can't rip the stream to put the sentences in my SRS... or on my mp3 player. Does anyone know a similar news site (w/audio and text) that lets you download the audio-casts ?

stehr Wrote:I like the tbs news site, the problem is that I can't rip the stream to put the sentences in my SRS... or on my mp3 player. Does anyone know a similar news site (w/audio and text) that lets you download the audio-casts ?

Use audacity. It lets you record sound of your soundcard, so anything your computer plays is recorded. You can also save it as .ogg (anki works MUCH better with .ogg than .mp3).

Just thought that it would be nice to translate some of these news items. Other members could use these as parallel texts. I`ve found lots of parallel texts for Japanese-English (worked on a few by myself), but have yet to find something like that for news (Hiragana Times somehow falls into this category).

@tobberoth; thanks, I've been using streamripper for winamp, but it's not always reliable.

watashimo Wrote:Just thought that it would be nice to translate some of these news items. Other members could use these as parallel texts. I`ve found lots of parallel texts for Japanese-English (worked on a few by myself), but have yet to find something like that for news (Hiragana Times somehow falls into this category).

Question is, would people trust our translations?

Tobberoth Wrote:

stehr Wrote:I like the tbs news site, the problem is that I can't rip the stream to put the sentences in my SRS... or on my mp3 player. Does anyone know a similar news site (w/audio and text) that lets you download the audio-casts ?

Use audacity. It lets you record sound of your soundcard, so anything your computer plays is recorded. You can also save it as .ogg (anki works MUCH better with .ogg than .mp3).

I just thought I should add, you don't actually need audacity to record sounds played by your speaker. You can use the voice recorder that comes with windows by default.

Audacity makes things a heck of a lot simpler though.

watashimo Wrote:Just thought that it would be nice to translate some of these news items.

Translations won't strengthen anybody's Japanese abilities. Instead of looking up words, figuring out grammatical structures and getting a grasp for how words are used within their given contexts, you can simply just look at the translation. This requires no effort, and thus no growth.

The idea of this thread is to get people to actually read the news articles. Hopefully if you see a one or two sentence summary of the article on this thread, it will spark your interest to click on the article and try to understand it for yourself. For example, you might wonder "how the hell do you say 'hurl a flaming hot pizza at a robber', anyway?" (read my next post!)

You can alse use a firefox extension called flashgot. It lets you download the video file.

ピザ配達人、手にした「熱いピザ」で強盗撃退

Somebody tried mugging a pizza delivery guy, but the dude resisted and threw a hot pizza at the wannabe robber. He ran away and heard a gunshot, the robber undoubtedly doing so from being pissed that some leprechaun ordered anchovies on his pizza.

Slightly OT, but here's something I've been doing lately in regards to studying from the news... one of my kocho-senseis actually recommended this to me. It's not exactly a novel idea or anything, but someone else might find it helpful...

I clip out the opinion column on the first page of the newspaper (or print them off the website). The two main ones I use are　風林火山 from the 山梨日日新聞 and 天声人語 from the 朝日新聞. I glue them in a notebook and then highlight/circle/whatever the words I don't know and then look them all up. But you get a lot of good vocab and a bit of insight into current events/popular opinion in Japan. I then sit down once a week or so (I'm lazy ) and put everything into anki for review. You'll also occasionally see this type of article pop up on the JLPT, so it's good practice. And they're short, so it's good for my short attention span

I love news. Especially when karma rears its ugly head.

京成本線踏切で死亡事故、車は盗難車

A car reported stolen and involved in a hit and run with a couple other cars was smashed to pieces with an oncoming train.

Yup. Karma's a bitch. Don't steal and hit other cars!

Quote:Translations won't strengthen anybody's Japanese abilities. Instead of looking up words, figuring out grammatical structures and getting a grasp for how words are used within their given contexts, you can simply just look at the translation. This requires no effort, and thus no growth.

What could be more useful is asking small reading comprehension questions. For example, about that latter article: 1) how long did the train line stop after the accident? 2) Was the accidented car a stolen car or a car involved in a hit and run? 3) why did the man talk about 荷物?

To clarify my post a bit, this could be kind of a game where one person posts an article and then asks reading comprehension questions and other people have to answer them. The point would be to enhance our reading comprehension in a fun way. It's shorter than translating the whole article, more fun and more useful. It would be a bit like a mini 読解練習。

Post resurrection!

のぞみドア連続こじ開け・急停車…広島駅

A guy was so desperate to get off of the Shinkansen (after it had already departed), he pryed the door open to get out. He really must've been in a hurry because he wasn't caught!

窒息死：８０歳男性が餅を詰まらせ

An 80 year old guy in Saitama decided to finish his year (and his life) by snacking on a piece of mochi. Unfortunately for him he forgot that you have to chew your food, so he ended up choking on it and dying.

Happy new years!

This is a great idea and it's something that I started doing about a year ago but have since stopped. What I used to do was record the audio from a news story from TBS or some site that also has the text. Then I would put the text into the ID part of the mp3 file, so on my iPod I could review the text of the audio if I didn't understand something. I have about 20 of these stories on there, some really bizzare ones like the death of the former chairman of the Japanese Communist Party, which I can credit for learning the words 共産党、 元議長、老衰、影響力! Seriously, I listened to these things over and over and over until I could repeat them myself in the same tone and speed as the presenter.

samesong Wrote:窒息死：８０歳男性が餅を詰まらせ

An 80 year old guy in Saitama decided to finish his year (and his life) by snacking on a piece of mochi. Unfortunately for him he forgot that you have to chew your food, so he ended up choking on it and dying.

Happy new years!

Poor old fella, an 80 year old shouldn't go out this way. By the way, have you noticed how much information a Japanese news story tries to pack into the first sentence.

１日午前８時１０分ごろ、埼玉県東秩父村の無職男性（８０）が餅をのどに詰まらせて倒れたと、男性の妻（７０）から１１９番通報があった

On the 1st of January at approximately 8:10am, there was an emergency 119 call from a the wife (70 years old) of an unemployed man (80 years old) from Higashi Chichibu Mura, Saitama prefecture saying that he had collapsed from mochi being caught in his throat.

Did they really need to say that this poor 80 year old bloke was unemployed?

bucko Wrote:Poor old fella, an 80 year old shouldn't go out this way. By the way, have you noticed how much information a Japanese news story tries to pack into the first sentence.

１日午前８時１０分ごろ、埼玉県東秩父村の無職男性（８０）が餅をのどに詰まらせて倒れたと、男性の妻（７０）から１１９番通報があった

On the 1st of January at approximately 8:10am, there was an emergency 119 call from a the wife (70 years old) of an unemployed man (80 years old) from Higashi Chichibu Mura, Saitama prefecture saying that he had collapsed from mochi being caught in his throat.

Did they really need to say that this poor 80 year old bloke was unemployed?

Personally I think it's handy. You can scan the first line of a story and be done with it. The rest of the article is usually fluff.

But I do agree with you, Japanese newspapers always add a lot of detailed (read superfluous) information. Do we really need to know the exact minute the phone call was placed? Anything train related, they always mention the exact station, time, car, etc.

And yes, newspapers always mention if somebody isn't working. I never really understood that either.

Top news in Japan: traffic jams!

Instead of posting something interesting, I'm posting something that is absurdley boring. This is the top story on the TBS website; Japan has long traffic jams and lots of people are coming back into the country. Woo.

Seriously, Japan, more exiciting shit needs to happen in your country.

That's news to me.

That channel seems to have a number of unsubtitled videos, some of which are Japanese.

ネットいじめ後に中３自殺、遺書に同級生の名　さいたま

校長「無関係」と言った。みんな、そう思う？思わない？

~J

Great article and I love this thread.

It's hard to say whether the school is to blame, as there isn't much information about the extent to which the school tried to help the poor girl. They did mention that the homeroom teacher forced some of the bullies to apologize. This is just a bad situation.

Here's one: http://www.fnn-news.com/news/headlines/a...47880.html

What did Tanioka tell the police at the beginning? What really happened?

kmoeini Wrote:Here's one: http://www.fnn-news.com/news/headlines/a...47880.html

Wow, what a shame.