‘Appy Mondays – News Easy Japanese

The second installment for this series is a review of News Easy Japanese, another reading comprehension app.

News Easy Japanese (CLcosmos Ltd, free)

This news reading comprehension app issues 3-4 articles each day covering current affairs, in the vein of NHK Easy Japanese, having been written using simpler language than standard newspaper articles but still use a lot of the vocabulary that does crop up.

Furigana can also be toggled on or off. Each article comes with sound clips where the article is clearly read and spoken at a steady speed facilitating easier reading comprehension. The items highlighted in green can be clicked on, and give simple definitions of the item in Japanese. I really like the Japanese-Japanese dictionary as it gives you the opportunity to understand new vocab using words you (hopefully) already know, and is especially useful for distinguishing between words which have appear to have similar English meanings.

As you can see above, the app also has articles on various weather phenomena you may likely come across living in Japan (typhoons, tornadoes, heavy snow, heavy rain, tsunamis and earthquakes). This is useful for picking up relevant vocabulary relating to weather warnings which you may come across on TV. Being from the UK, earthquakes are not something I am used to, so having the opportunity to brush up on dealing with earthquakes is always helpful.

The only real downside of this app is that it does not have any offline functionality. Apart from that, I can definitely recommend this app to JLPT N3/ intermediate level learners looking to practice their newspaper reading comprehension, especially if you are looking to move away from Japanese-English dictionaries.

Rating: 4.5/5 stars 

 

‘Appy Mondays – NHK News Reader Review

Hello and Happy New Year! I hope 2017 will be a great year for all 🙂

Today’s post is the first of a new series called ‘Appy Mondays, where I will be reviewing some of the many Japanese language learning apps to see if they are worth using. This series will focus on apps available on Android as I do not own any Apple devices at present. I am also all about free or low cost apps whenever possible, and the cost will be factored into these reviews.

Today’s review is of NHK News Reader (AOVILL team, free)

 

How NHK News Reader works

This app provides access to the latest NHK articles, with additional functions suited for Japanese language learners. Articles are split by topic, but the main landing page will always show the main headlines.

Each article has the option to show furigana above kanji. Articles are accompanied by a video showing the corresponding item as read on Japanese TV, which is generally identical to the text (the text differs sometimes when people are interviewed and their speech has been paraphrased).

As these videos are from Japanese TV, the speed is at a natural speed (ie. fast), so it is good for testing your comprehension of real Japanese. Article lengths do vary but the articles are for the most part not too long, and are best suited for a 15-30 minute reading session.

 

My thoughts on NHK News Reader

The option for furigana is always helpful for learners, but there is no integrated dictionary within the app. This would not be much of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the app does tend to freeze. I found that this always happened when I tried to switch apps to look a word up in the dictionary whilst in the middle of reading an article, the app screen would go blank when I returned to the app.

This is a shame because unless you have a physical dictionary to hand, you would, of course, be switching apps frequently. I often use my journey to work for studying Japanese for example and so this app would not be easy to use on my commute. Your device has to be connected to the internet to use the app, which makes sense as there are integrated videos, but it would have been nice to have the option to view the articles themselves offline.

I should say that the app is free, but there is a paid version for £3.99. However looking at the reviews for the paid version, the extra cost does not add functionality that I would be expecting, namely the ability to view articles offline and an integrated dictionary.

Overall, I think that as a free app it may be worth trying out if you are around JLPT N2 level and looking for authentic news articles and video to work on your newspaper reading comprehension. It is a decent free app, but I could not recommend it or its paid upgrade app as an essential resource for intermediate/ advanced learners with the bugs it currently has.

Update: if you are interested in other reading apps, I recommend TangoRisto or Mondo – both are free and improve upon a lot of the issues I had with this app!