Learn Japanese Today

The Daily Yomiuri is available in English and Japanese .

To read the Japanese version, I recommend utilizing Rikai.com’s reading tool .

Alright, I just had a long day at work, so I’m just gonna get right to it.

Ease of Use: 8

The big thing working against The Daily Yomiuri is that the articles aren’t directly linked to their translations on the English site. Delays for translation can be as brief as a weekend or as long as three days, so the way I usually go about is I find an article that looks interesting on the English web site. I read the headline, then I got try to find it on the Japanese site. The best way is to go under the respective section that best describes the story:　    社会 (society)、スポーツ(sports)、経済(business)、政治(politics), and hit CTRL+F and type in Japanese a name or a place from the English article. As far as I can tell, national Japan news is translated within an hour or so, while most other stuff is put up within a day or so.

For example, I just read a headline about a girl who stabbed her father to death in Kawaguchi. I then typed 川口 into my “Find” box after clicking on the 社会 tab, and found the Japanese story from three days ago. It’s a pretty interesting one, here’s the English article , the Japanese article , and the follow-up Japanese article that hasn’t been translated in yet in which it is discovered the young murderess had a collection of “occult manga.” And you though Deathnote was just for fun.

Note that all of these articles are already put through Rikai. I know. You’re welcome.

Authenticity:8

I’m inclined to say that you don’t get much more authentic than an actual Japanese newspaper, but you don’t just hand a third-grader an issue of the New York Times and expect him/her/it to just pick it up. And then how are you supposed to feel when your third-grader is struggling to use ‘ombudsman’ in a sentence. What’s that? You don’t know that one? Well…yeah, I just learned that today. We had the ombudsman from NPR give a talk to the newsroom staff today. It was awesome.

Back to the point, unless you’re at a level of reading fluency where you can comfortably read a Japanese newspaper, a lot of the vocabulary will be pretty advanced for you. However, these are the words and the kanji you need to know to read a newspaper, so you better learn them sometime. Not to toot my own journalism horn, but who do you think you are if you can’t even read the paper?

Quantity of Knowledge: 9.5

So I started reading this one article, about the regulations of the Ministry of Defense’s Ground Self-Defense Force and there was one word I knew in the first paragraph. This is just to let you know what your getting into. There are going to be a lot of proper nouns that you won’t even know in English, so if you’re just getting started, stick to the murdering kids.

There’s plenty of stuff out there to read though once you’re good enough.

Price: 10

Such a free website. So good.

Fun: 6

This can really depend on the article. I had a lot of fun reading about the murdering kid and her manga. Reading about the Ministry of Defense was like getting an anal probe. Read what you like.

Overall: 8.3

If you’re good enough to read these articles in Japanese without Rikai, then CONGRATULATIONS! Go start your own blog. For those of us that have to struggle, this is like one of those scholarly journals in the library. You never really feel like sitting back and cracking one open, but if you put in the hours you’ll really be rewarded.

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