TBS News (Intermediate reading practice)

I know a lot of people studying Japanese read NHK Easy News. However, I’ve also seen a lot of people who find it too easy, but real news too difficult. I’ve been using TBS News recently and I find it’s a nice fit for that space in between.

I know there are similar things on Reddit for NHK Easy, so I wonder if people would be interested in trying a kind of community translation thing for TBS? The articles are very short (similar to NHK Easy) so say one article a day? Here’s the first headline from the current site:

Should be readable for most intermediate students (especially with the help of Rikaikun etc). I’ll post what I’ve understood and what I haven’t below and hopefully we can help each other…

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I’ll use spoilers in case people want to try to translate by themselves first.

What I understood:

A girl was attacked at the entrance to an old folks’ home where she was delivering food by a man with a knife. The man bound her hands behind her back and inflicted minor cuts to her arms and face. The man has been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and the police believe he had indecent intentions. The man admits the kidnapping attempt but denies the indecent intent allegations.

What I don’t understand:

What exactly happened at the door? There’s something about other workers? Did they scare the assailant / prevent the kidnapping? Is the man the girl’s boss? That was how I read it at first, but at one point he’s simply identified as a worker from Kyoto, which would be an odd way to describe him if he’s the girl’s boss. If he’s not the girl’s boss, then what did the boss do? Edit: Okay, after rereading, the man is definitely the girl’s boss. I’m still a bit confused by the final paragraph, though.

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Creepy boss of the year award! :open_mouth:
I think: When another (or maybe more than one other) employee showed up for work he ran off (implying he might have continued on with more/worse things if they hadn’t)
Also (now that I finally read the whole article) the boss lied and pretended that he and the girl were both the victims of some other attacker.

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I’ll try one more. This one’s about virtual currencies - about which there’s a devoted thread somewhere around here, I think - and so a good place to learn the vocab 仮想通貨.

Seems on the 26th the accounts / servers? of Coin Check were accessed illegally and roughly $580m worth of NEM (type of currency?) were leaked / stolen. Coin Check shut down their exchange and on the 27th concerned investors turned up outside their Shibuya offices - one of whom explained he had about $5k invested there and was unable to access it all right now. Coin Check said some investors may not be able to recover their money. This would be the biggest ever loss from such a place, even more than the approx $470m lost by Mount Gox 4 years ago. This incident shows the risks involved in this sort of investment.

I think I got almost everything from this one bar any explanation of how the money disappeared. From context it seems to have been done deliberately by criminals, but on the first read through I thought it might have been some sort of ‘leak’ (I don’t know much about how crypto currencies work). I’m also unsure quite what the investors were doing outside the offices. Did they just gather there hoping to meet the staff?

I think it’s quite common practice for disgruntled investors to show up at the head office of a company or a bank when something like this happens. Not just in Japan. It gets media attention, apart from anything else! I guess people want to be reassured that they haven’t lost all their money.

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