NHK News Web Easier provides content for people wishing to learn Japanese, in the form of text, voice and video.
NHK News Web is the online newspaper edited by NHK (日本放送協会), Japan's public broadcasting company. News Web Easy is a version targeted at children with simpler words, kanji and sentence structures, and with furigana (振り仮名).
NHKEasier gathers content from News Web Easy and presents it in a way optimized for language learners:
- partially (show on mouse hover) or fully disable furigana
- quick access to translations of words and expressions
- voice and video served by HTML5 (no Flash player needed)
- valid RSS feed to use in your news aggregator
Regarding the translations, NHKEasier relies on the EDICT Dictionary File and serves a subset optimized for each page.
NHK News Web Easier is not affiliated with NHK.
The main feature of this website was inspired by a series of webbrowser extenions called Rikaikun (Google Chrome), Rikaichan (Mozilla Firefox, obsolete) and Rikaichamp (Mozilla Firefox, replacement of Rikaichan). You can use these extension to benefit from a quick-access Japanese dictionary working on any website!
- Install Rikaikun on Google Chrome
- Install Rikaichamp on Mozilla Firefox
If you prefer reading news directly on NHK News Web Easy, or regularly consult other website with furigana, install Furigana toggle (either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox) to hide them by default! You will be able to display them simply by hovering the kanji with your cursor. Alternatively, you can use the smartphone application Sync for NHK Easy News for offline reading.
As an addition to News Web Easy articles, you can also study NHK's introduction to Japanese for English speakers (also available in multiple languages).