People aren’t, but banks might be - isn’t the idea to encourage the banks to make more investments/loans?
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I don’t know the answers to these questions, I’m just parroting what I’ve read on the internet. If 2008 taught us anything, though, it’s that banks don’t really need any particular incentive to issue loans. 
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Hello 
I liked this topic and the proposal, and I added my name to the list.
I’m still at a low level in WaniKani (currently level 9), and I chose to read one article from NHK News Easy every day:
but when I have more time, or my level increases, I’ll try to read more than one (up to 4 articles).
At the moment, I’m choosing the articles that seem easiest to understand.
To give some examples:
- dolphin (イルカ)
- 2 little tigers (二匹のトラの赤ちゃん)
- migratory bird (ブッポウソウ)
And, quoting @kakapo: “…that we will all reinforce our reading skills together!”
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Up to you how you want to tackle it, any reading no matter how slow or selective it is, is good 
Myself, I use Yomitan to power through 3-4 articles every day (they publish 4), I might skip one if it’s not interesting. Then Deepl to check my understanding.
The grammar is rarely surprising after skimming through Genki 1+2 (by design, that’s the point of the ‘easy’ version), but there’s still a lot of unknown vocab 
Some may see it as “cheating” but even so, I’ve seen some progress in reading speed: from 13-14 minutes per article (about two months ago when I started) down to 11-12 and nowadays 8-9.
Still a far cry from Firefox’s indication of 1-2 mins at a “native” reading speed, but maaaybe someday…
There are some very tough articles - like the finance one @trunklayer mentioned earlier - which are just… 
and make me want to cry 
but, oh, well…
I use a couple other addons for Firefox: Furigana Toggle and Furiganize. Combining these two, you can get furigana on mouse cursor hover over individual kanji, which is IMHO better than NHKs global on/off toggle.
They also work for the “regular” edition of NHK, although I am not (yet?) brave enough to read the news there 
Edit: by the way, from what I’ve seen so far Yomitan indicates a large chunk of the vocab is in the WK 8-15 levels, then the next chunk will be in the 40s levels, with the 20-30 levels coming in third, then the rest.
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Hi, @cezarL
Thanks for your tips and suggestions.
I took note of your add-on suggestions. I had only heard of yomitan, although I haven’t tried them yet, but I’ll install and test them all later.
I started reading NHK Easy at the end of July, and to get used to reading, I was choosing the easiest ones, regardless of the date. Starting this week, I’m going to try to read 2 articles published on the same day. And, as I improve my reading and wanikani level, I hope to get to 4 articles published on the same day,
and I’m going to leave finance and politics to add last, because they seem more difficult.
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The article was easy, but I’m not sure I understand this phrase correctly:
タイで売れた車の約90%が日本の車だったこともありました。
If it was 「タイで売れた車の約90%が日本の車でした」-- I would have translated it as “About 90% of cars sold in Thailand were Japanese cars”.
But because it ends not with 「でした」but with 「だったこともありました」-- I would roughly translate it as “There were time periods when about 90% of cars sold in Thailand were Japanese cars”. Is this translation correct or am I missing something?
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I would agree with the gist of that translation. Apart from anything else it would be incorrect to definitively say “Across all history, Japanese cars have always been 90% of the Thailand car market”.
Interestingly, the phrase in the article proper is expressed a bit differently:
タイでは、日本メーカーの車がかつてはおよそ9割の販売シェアを占めていましたが、中国のEVメーカーの販売攻勢などを受けて減少し、去年は8割を下回りました。
“Japanese carmakers used to occupy 90% of the sale market …” etc etc
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I see, thank you!
Btw, does 「8割を下回りました」mean they fell to the point below 80% or does it mean they fell more than 80% – to the point below 10% (as they used to be 90%: 90 - 80 = 10)?
As I undrstandit’s the latter, and if it were the former, に would have been used instead of を、right? Or am I misunderstanding something?
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I’m going to have to phone a friend on this one, I think it means ‘Below 80%’ but I don’t want to confidently state that lol
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If that’s the case (i. e. your friend confirms that it means “below 80%”) – then, if it’s ok, could you please ask how would one say that they fell 80% down? This is something I’ve always had some problems with – how to say something like “x decreased n points” vs. “x decreased to the value of n points” 
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I think if you look at the definition of the verb, it might become clearer:
So to me this means that it is now just below 80% of the market.
To say “it fell by 80%” I would expect verbs like 下がる or 減る, but then again I’m not a native, so…
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And here’s the second time I find such an article!
I do have quite a large gap of unread urticles though, so there might have been other articles between these two… However, considering how rare such articles are – I doubt it! 
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That travel article made me realize that I need to understand more about the world, geography and history.
Sigh there is so much to know
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いちばん高い値段になったサケは、1kgで8万8888円でした。
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, this would be a sign of something very significant approaching, like birth of a Sorcerer
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Sourcerer* 
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Anyone else think this whole Japanese (Asian, rather? I know at least India has something similar) numbering system with 万 and 億 and whatnot is the work of the devil? 
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No? We do exactly the same thing with the words “thousand”, “million”, “billion” and so forth - the only difference is that our separator words are powers of 103, while the Japanese separators are powers of 104.
I’ll agree the Indian system is weird, though - their separator words are 105+2n. That is, the first (lakh) comes at 105, but then they come every two powers of ten after that - crore = 107, arab = 109, kharab = 1011 and so forth.
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Yes, but in an ideal world everyone would be using the same system… I mean ours, of course
Dunno… I find it really difficult to process the likes of 2488万5175 or 2156万1801; heck, even 329万 is annoying (these are from another NHK article, I didn’t make them up )
Thank god they use the metric system, though!
Edit- Full disclosure: because I am lazy, I just use Deepl to quickly “translate” those amounts into something understandable to me. But more power to those who don’t cheat
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P. S.
No, they are not – it’s just that Discourse tends to lose tags during quotation, which happened with the <sup> tags here
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Anyway, returning to news,
I find it really touching that they had to postpone their honeymoon due to COVID – and as a result, they became the 190 000 000th visitors of the Tokyo Tower!
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