Listening to NHK News Easy?

Japanese Language Listening
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I’ve been listening to the NHK news easy articles on my phone. It allows me to “read along” while the reader is speaking.

Has anyone else found good free resources for listening/reading along online?

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Video game Let’s Plays, if you’re into that.
Search YouTube for 実況プレイ. There are some in which they narrate the text, so you may have to do a bit of searching to find one that suits your purpose but there’s a lot out there.

Also, 福娘童話集 -世界と日本の童話・昔話集-
There’s a bunch of fairy tales, folk tales, legends, etc here for free, with native speakers reading them. I highly recommend it.

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One of these days someone will code an iOS app to scrape the content off this site and make it more easily accessible for playing while driving. I’d like to have the articles indexed and a large “Play” button next to them right on the main page. The next track buttons would allow cycling through the audio tracks for the different articles so I don’t need to take my eyes off the road once the first article was being played.

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I haven’t considered Let’s Plays. I don’t play games as much as I used to (mostly don’t have the time and haven’t really found anything interesting lately).

I was considering a few children’s games like Cooking Mama or Hi! Hamtaro Ham-Ham Challenge. I forcibly bludgeoned my way through おさわり探偵 小沢里奈. I had played it in english first and then japanese so I remembered most of the story.

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Yeah video games can be a massive waste of time for a bunch of reasons, so I wouldn’t force yourself to get into Let’s Plays; though, unlike podcasts (for example, I started listening to ひいきびいき, but I don’t understand a lot of it), there’s a lot of context that you can get from the surroundings as to what they’re talking about, so it can be helpful in that way.

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Just in case it can be of help, I’ve created a self hosted app that sends one NHK easy article to Instapaper every day. Before sending the URL to Instapaper itself I scrape the contents of the articles, remove the ruby tags (I want to practice without furigana) and put them in a bare bones page. This way Instapaper can display the articles much better.

The code is here GitHub - calderalabs/nhk_easy_to_instapaper: Add one NHK EASY article to Instapaper every day

Just as an example, this is how an article will be displayed:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/k10010909711000/k10010909711000.html
VS
http://nhk-easy-to-instapaper.herokuapp.com/k10010909711000

Basically by appending the article ID to the base url http://nhk-easy-to-instapaper.herokuapp.com you can get corresponding article.

EDIT: If there is enough interest in something like this I might consider making it a service so that people can subscribe instead of having to self-host the app.

EDIT: Another article in the app

640×1136 128 KB

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