Probably the best way to get used to reading news articles in Japanese is either reading news made for kids or news related to stuff that's at least slightly more interesting than 麻生総理 and the guy in his cabinet who gets drunk before press meetings (it was interesting before it appeared in the news 16 more times after that).

Here's an article that's kinda helping me get used to reading Japanese news:

http://sankei.jp.msn.com/entertainments/...000-n1.htm

Yeah yeah ok, it's anime related >>;

Anyone have fun news articles you'd like to share?

Try looking in the thread of news articles? ;-)
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2298

I really really like http://news.tbs.co.jp/
I generally check the headings searching for financial and crime related articles.

I'm with mentat_kgs. Not only are the articles at news.tbs.co.jp fun and interesting, you get a video with it. The news articles are more or less transcripts of the video, great study tool.

pm125, thanks for directing me to that thread, I just got a lot of good sentences from some of those articles. I'm going to add the Doraemon one to that forum. Hopefully the thread will stay going for awhile. Too bad a lot of the old articles (even just 2 months old) get taken down off the news websites really quickly.

Yahoo kids news.

http://news.kids.yahoo.co.jp/

mentat_kgs Wrote:I really really like http://news.tbs.co.jp/
I generally check the headings searching for financial and crime related articles.

Thanks, that seems really helpful! Somehow I find things easier to understand when there is a video to go. As apposed to just a podcast.

[Katsuo]

The main TV stations here usually have an Internet video news service as well:

NHK
NTV
TBS
FNN
Asahi

The question is : how many of them have an accurate transcript ?
I know FNN has , I'm watching FNN news every morning, but I doubt that the rest of them care about that .

More important : am I only the only one to be utterly disappointed by tbs ? TBS articles have been used as classroom text on a regular basis and most of the time they turned out to be pointless information collection without any logical link whatsoever . I have a very vivid memory about an article dealing with the crisis : the text jumped from iron scrap industry to automobile industry and everyone in my class , including the teacher , failed to see where the so called journalist was going .

ghinzdra Wrote:More important : am I only the only one to be utterly disappointed by tbs ? TBS articles have been used as classroom text on a regular basis and most of the time they turned out to be pointless information collection without any logical link whatsoever . I have a very vivid memory about an article dealing with the crisis : the text jumped from iron scrap industry to automobile industry and everyone in my class , including the teacher , failed to see where the so called journalist was going .

Not likely to have been the case here (since your teacher didn't like the article either), but you do know about the Japanese essay structure (ki-shoo-ten-ketsu) with the sudden change of subject halfway through, right?

Well, I can't be sure there was a connection just from what you said, and the fact that no one saw it suggests there wasn't, but scrap iron and automobiles tend to each be a "raw" material for producing the other.

~J

It's been awhile since I looked at the news websites. I went to the FNN one (thanks Ghinzdra) and watched a few selections.

Seeing the topic of the thread (getting used to reading the news), I tried: Watch the segment first, read the transcript, play the segment while reading (well, keep up with) the transcript, and finally rewatch the segment.

This can very well become a part of my daily routine. Thanks to this thread for the reminder.

I'm doing it every morning 5-6 AM.
I have the greatest difficulty to tell IF I progressed and TO WHAT EXTENT .Sometimes I feel slightly better , sometimes I'm still totally nonplussed . I have a good grasp on international headlines while the japanese politic related article are the worst by far . I remember reading a success story on AJATT about someone who claimed having a perfect understanding of japense news after 6 months ....but I must acknowledge he was really hardcore : every morning + in the street + anytime he had 10 minutes free he was trying to listen some more and write what he understood .

I have not enough interest in news to do that and what really annoys me is that it seems to imply his whole japanese training was devoted to understanding news.


How many readings and kanji compounds are supposed to be known in order to understand japanese names ?

ghinzdra Wrote:How many readings and kanji compounds are supposed to be known in order to understand japanese names ?

Names are names. Readings and compounds makes very very little difference, kanji usually have unique pronunciations in names. The only way to be sure how a name is read is to have seen it before and heard someone say it.

This week was worrying about the same thing. I was even making plans to make flashcards from dorama's casts.

Yeah, there are names that are unfigureoutable. But most of them seem to follow a few set of (mystic) rules letting you throw sometimes comfortable guesses. Writing names is different of course ^_^'.

Has someone done this already?

A spreadsheet with the major towns and 区 would be nice too.

Yeah that's my point .
I perfectly know that each name represents a new challenge . That's precisely why I want to know how many of them you've got to learn so that you might avoid to stop every 2 lines in japanese politics related article . Now that it is mentionned , Drama must be also be in real pain in the ass.

I read that there are currently 2232 jinmeiyo kanji so it makes me fear how many specific reading you have to read before reaching a 80%-90% understanding.

Again, though, I don't think you do reach that level of understanding; the majority of names of people who aren't public figures that I see have the reading given the first time they appear.

I can't say that with any great certainty, but that is what I have thus far been led to believe.

~J

Exactly, if you want to read Japanese political articles, you're just going to have to learn the big names. Obviously, proficiency and vocabulary in Japanese is vital as well. If you know few jukugo, you will probably assume that each name is a jukugo. However, when you know tons of jukugo, you can guess that it is a name (simply because you don't recognize the compound). So I guess, learning compounds IS a big part of it

Personally, I just read the sentence. 90% of the time, it's obvious right there if it's a name or a jukugo. If it's a name, I search for it on google/wikipedia if I think it's a decently famous person. There's also the Names dictionary on jisho.org which can tell you the pronunciation but there's usually tons of pronunciations for each name so...

Wikipedia has a list of Japan cities by population. It also has a list of Tokyo 区. All in kanji. But this seems not the case for Japan's personalities.

Are there any names that are also jukugo that anyone is aware of?

~J

Ghinzdra! You just reminded me! Using celebrity names are great for learning names in general. D-addicts wiki has a database of celebrity names, photos cross referenced with shows. We have geniuses on this forum that are great at stripping data off websites and putting them in spreadsheet formats.

So:

Can anybody strip mine the D-addicts wiki that has Japanese actors names and photos and TV shows starred in? This can be a ready made resource to put famous people's names in Anki. Obviously the best choices are actors to dramas that you like.

Granted, if there's a list for other famous people that one should know, that would be great too.

Well, for the last week, been trying to be more consistent on watching http://www.fnn-news.com and reading the articles.

Now I watch the news first, then play again while reading along using Furigana injector, read outloud on my own (gods I suck at this), then watch it play it one last time. It can take 5 to 8 minutes for a 1 minute segment.

Nukemarine Wrote:Well, for the last week, been trying to be more consistent on watching http://www.fnn-news.com and reading the articles.

Now I watch the news first, then play again while reading along using Furigana injector, read outloud on my own (gods I suck at this), then watch it play it one last time. It can take 5 to 8 minutes for a 1 minute segment.

I've started doing the same thing. It blows my mind how even if you understand more or less every word used, it's very hard to keep up with the actual news video. It just goes to prove that knowing a word isn't enough to hear it on the fly in a sentence, one really needs to work on the listening skill.

I watch the video once. Then I watch it again but with my eyes closed, focusing on what is being said. Then I read the article and check just about how much I understand. Then I mine it. Then I listen while reading. Then I loop it for a while

That fnn-news.com is a good site - listening will take a >LOT< of practice.

Recently, with iKnow, I have been focusing a lot more on listening comprehension. I'm beginning to wonder if adults have a harder time (than children) listening because they rely too much on reading. Maybe kids absorb so quickly because it's too hard for them to read so they naturally listen more attentively.

Keeping this in mind, I try to listen to fnn-news.com once first without looking, once while watching the news, and then I read the text, and then repeat watching/listening. I'm going to try this out for a while to see if my listening improves.

Names have their own meaning.

Btw, I compiled a list ripped from some websites of around ~500 文書 author names.
I did not used celebrities because they sometimes chose stupid fancy names and I'm not interested on that.

From the little experience I've got. I can see that reading names is quite easy. The only thing is that kanjis have special "name only" readings. For instance, しも for 下.

Anyone interested? I can make an anki file available.