I see, but still, why show the upper limit? I mean, before this October the lower limit was 5 years old.
Now it’s 6 months old. What’s so special about 4 years old then?
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They’re talking about what’s changed (it’s news, it’s stuff that’s new ;-)) – and the thing that has changed is the situation for this specific age range, who previously were not given the vaccine and now can be, because they’ve done the safety and efficacy testing on that age group and worked out the right dose and so on.
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Ah, I see, thank you for explaining!
I guess, me and the author of that article have different approaches to presenting the news. As I see it, the only thing that’s changed – is the lower age limit of vaccination, but they see it as children from 6 months to 4 years old, who were previously unable to get vaccinated, are now able to.
P. S. Yes, I guess, I was thinking in terms of math.
The previous limit was [5 y. o.; +\infty), now it became [6 m. o.; +\infty), but they wrote it as [6m.o.;4y.o.]\cup[4y.o.;+\infty)
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The only true area measurement is tatami mats 
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According to
today is Sports Day, so no new NHK Easy News today…
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This is very interesting. My mother always said that I use too much salt and that it’s not very healthy. And I guess she was right, but I can’t change meowself… However, if this works – then it might be exactly what I need…
Then again, it would take a while till it would become widely available and also it’s possible that it might have some side effects…
Still, I’m looking forward to trying this out someday.
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Finally!
I remember reading the news about that girl on NHK Easy News when it happened – and I was completely shocked by the fact that they weren’t performing the checks to see if everyone disembarked.
Whenever you are dealing with a group of small children – it’s mere common sense to perform such checks. Who in their right mind would think that it’s ok not to do so?
Apparently, around 10% of kindergardens thought so… I’m glad that such checks are now finally mandatory. I wish a child didn’t have to die for them to finally see common sense…
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I hope one day to test drive those self driving cars
they look very sci fi to me 
in the video it shows the word 普及, that once again it should be added to wanikani as popularization and not only ‘diffusion’ (very odd word).
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I think “spread” is often a good translation for 普及, and is a bit better than ‘popularization’ for the use in this specific video. My dictionary also suggests paraphrases like ‘become widespread’ and ‘come into general use’. We’re not waiting for self-driving cars to become popular, we’re waiting for them to be in general use as opposed to a handful of test and development setups.
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is this article saying that japanese people have 10 days in year to ask for absence from work so they can have free time to do something else like leisure and still get paid?
in my country this only happens with public employees. 
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As I understand it, it’s only about the employees of that kindergarden.
They often have to work on Sundays too, so the management decided to allow them to have 10 days per year to be able to visit concerts / events that they are looking for.
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It’s “this employer is giving its staff 10 extra days of paid holiday on top of the national minimum requirement, and has given the scheme a cutesy name”.
I think the social aspect here is that the kindergarten is trying to encourage its employees to actually take holiday, and to emphasise that it’s OK to do that for “frivolous” or personal reasons. I dunno what the typical conditions in the Japanese childcare industry are like, but I could easily imagine staff being reluctant to take all the holiday they’re entitled to if they feel like they’d be letting down their coworkers or coming off as not being ‘hard-working’.
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Wanted to write this a few days ago, but forgot.
It’s interesting that in Japan one needs a driving license to ride such electric scooter. Where I live, on the other hand, not only you can ride them without any license, but even the rules for using them are still being developed. Even for the bicycles there are rules, but for electric scooters – no, because it’s a relatively new phenomenon here… I guess eventually there will be some rules for them, but I don’t think they would require a license.
とにかく、
実は、コロナウイルスはもうあまり新しくありませんが、気をつけることはまだ必要です。
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I think it depends a lot on how the existing laws are framed – depending on the exact definitions used, electric scooters might happen to fall into one of several different existing legal vehicle definitions, or into none at all – and if the latter, that might mean either “no rules on use” or “not legal in public at all”. Here in the UK, because they’re vehicles with less than four wheels and with a motor and weighing less than 410 kg they fall into the “motorcycle/moped” bucket. That means (a) they’re not legal to use on the pavement or pedestrian areas (b) you need a licence etc (c) you can’t use them on the road either because they don’t meet the construction and safety standards that were written for motorcycles – so you can legally buy one but only to use on private land. The government had to change the law to permit rental e-scooters on a trial basis.
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interesting learning new meanings for words, here I thought “wat? sending a postcard to apply for a meal ticket? is this the 90s?”
then for yomichan it shows that はがき can also mean card or note. More suitable.
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I think I’d call it a postcard in English too – it’s a fixed size bit of card that you drop into the mail. There’s a picture of one at the top of this website, for example. You don’t have to use their preprinted ones either – you can fill in a standard post office postcard if you like.
I imagine most people will use the digital one, of course.
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When I applied to visit Saihoji, I was required to send a snail-mail letter with a return-addressed postcard (and an International Reply Coupon to cover the postage). Since I’m not in Japan, all I can buy at the post office here is regular Western-style postcards. So I made my own.
When I got the reply, they’d just cut my address out of the postcard and taped it to the front of a regular old envelope.
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First of all, this is absolutely horrible. Such things should not be allowed to happen.
Secondly, there are two things I’m not sure I understood correctly:
大勢の人が坂の下にいる人に重なるように倒れて、事故になったようです。
Am I correct that those who were uphill were knocked over and stamped by those who were downhill? Judging from the photos of the scene, people were arriving from downhill, so it does make sense, but I want to make sure I didn’t mistranslate it and it wasn’t the other way around.
Another question is
本当に残念です
said by the father of a girl who was among the victims. I mean, is it appropriate for such a tragedy? I thought it was more for ordinary unfortunate events, like missing the train or forgetting the lunchbox… It seems strange seeing it being used for losing a child…
Anyway, I really hope that a way to prevent such tragedies would be developed and implemented soon.
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No, it’s the other way around. If you split out the ように clause you get
大勢の人が(…)倒れて “many people fell”
and the ように tells you the way/manner it happened’
坂の下にいる人に重なるように “in a way that they piled on top of the people at the bottom of the slope”.
The non-easy version of the article has:
大勢の人が坂の上の方から次々と折り重なるように倒れていった
which in this case I think is clearer than the easy text.
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Then why did they use 倒れる instead of 倒す？
If it were the people uphill who knocked over and stamped people who were downhill – shouldn’t the easy version have been something like
大勢の人が坂の下にいる人を重なるように倒して、事故になったようです。
In non-easy version you quoted it’s also 倒れる
大勢の人が坂の上の方から(…)倒れていった
So, as I understand it – it’s people uphill who were knocked over…
Or is it that the people uphill got knocked over, fell on those who were below them and in this way crushed them?
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