Monthly News Challenge

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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tomgosse
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Re: Some french news sources

Postby tomgosse » Sun Nov 01, 2015 4:03 pm

emk wrote:
tomgosse wrote:This personal list is all in html. Do I need to install feedly to read it?

My personal list is all in OMPL format, which can be imported by almost any RSS reader. Or if you don't have an RSS reader and don't want to get one, you can usually just eyeball the file and look for site names and URLs; it's almost human readable.

I personally encourage news junkies to at least try out an RSS reader once (and Feedly is both excellent and free). The advantage of an RSS reader is that it allows you to scan all your favorite news sources and blogs quickly, in one place, and to curate your favorite sources. A fancy RSS reader like Feedly can also offer a "what's hot today" version of the news, pointing you towards the most popular articles. And Feedly can also sync read vs unread articles between the website and your phone. Oh, and usually there are almost no ads!

If you fill up an RSS reader with interesting foreign language sites, and if you stick an icon in a prominent place, you can have your daily fill of interesting news just by tapping a button reflexively. As Khatzumoto points out, we all follow the path of least resistance, so we should make it ridiculously easy to get our foreign language news fix. :-)


Thank you for the tip. I finally figured out how to import the OPML file into feedly. :P For those of you who also want to import it, and who doesn't, first follow the link to emk's list. Then click in text to select all (CTRL-A), then copy it to the clipboard (CTRL-C). Open any text editor and paste it in and save it as a *.opml file.

Go to http://cloud.feedly.com/#cortex. Click on the Browse button and choose the .opml file that you saved, then click on the Import button. Feedly will now import the file.

All the best,
Tom
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Sun Nov 01, 2015 5:00 pm

emk wrote:Now, all that said, anybody who wants to take a B2 exam will quickly discover that B2 examiners love news articles and politics. It's a legitimate part of language learning. And so a monthly news challenge is a great idea, and of course we want to allow it. So let me propose a few rules of thumb for this challenge:

  • For people who prefer clear, straightforward rules: The safest thing to do is to steer well clear of politics, or to only link to articles that you're pretty sure are uncontroversial. And if an article does turn out to be controversial, please just say "Sorry" and avoid linking to articles like that in the future.
  • For people who are good at social nuance: The moderators are primarily concerned about maintaining a mutually respectful atmosphere where everybody can discuss languages without feeling the need to defend themselves. We want to avoid long, bitter threads which leave people upset and hurt. And we're bored senseless by people parroting standard political talking points at each other. But at the same time, we do want people to read and share interesting news articles. In other words: there's a small amount of grey area here, if you use it carefully and if you don't make unnecessary work for the moderators. :-) This rule of thumb explains, by the way, some seemingly inconsistent things about how we moderate: certain subjects (such as language politics) may usually be safe about country X but hugely nasty about country Y. So use your good judgement and please defer to the moderators, even if we sometimes seem inconsistent.
  • For everybody: If somebody's post makes you really mad, and if you feel you just have to respond, please consider using the "Report" or "!" button (depending on your theme) to notify the moderators instead of flaming people. And similarly, if the moderators do need to intervene in the challenge, their decisions are final. Similarly, if everybody else in the thread is like, "No! Don't go there! Please don't get our thread locked!", then please take that as hint that you may have misjudged the situation.
aokoye, does that help any?


Perfect! Those rules sound great and are essentially what I was aiming for.
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aokoye
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Re: Some french news sources

Postby aokoye » Sun Nov 01, 2015 5:13 pm

emk wrote:[*]For satirical news (The Onion-style), your best bet is usually Le Gorafi. I don't know whether these count; please check with aokoye for challenge rules. :-)


While Le Gorafi does sound amusing, as I'm a fan of The Onion, I'm afraid that's just outside of the rules of the challenge. That's for adding all of the links though - it's a great list!
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Re: Some french news sources

Postby emk » Sun Nov 01, 2015 7:09 pm

tomgosse wrote:Thank you for the tip. I finally figured out how to import the OPML file into feedly. :P For those of you who also want to import it, and who doesn't, first follow the link to emk's list. Then click in text to select all (CTRL-A), then copy it to the clipboard (CTRL-C). Open any text editor and paste it in and save it as a *.opml file.

Thank you for posting those instructions!

Another tool for news is Twitter. I personally find it less useful than Feedly, because if I follow a major news site on Twitter, it just overwhelms everything else in my feed: All the fun little Twitter accounts that publish a few times a day, or a few times a week, just disappear under a flood of headlines from the big papers: "1 min ago, 2 mins ago, 6 mins ago, 8 mins ago."

One solution is to make a separate "list" on Twitter just for news. Here's a Twitter list that I just tossed together with a mix of popular French news sources. If you find any of these news source interesting, you can "Follow" them, or even make your own list. It's also worth spending a few minutes to adjust the mix of news your personal taste: More technology, or more sports, or whatever. With a bit of work and some custom lists, you can turn Twitter into a halfway decent news tool.

But I still enjoy Feedly a lot more in practice. I love the way that I can organize news sources into groups like "General News" and "Technology" and "Startups" and "Humor". And for each group, I get a custom "front page": a selection of 7 or 10 especially popular articles in that category. It's like opening up a newspaper, and quickly scanning pages A1, B1, C1, and so on—except that the paper is already customized. Here's what my main "News" section looks like:

feedly-news-highlights.png


Now, this might not work for somebody else! And of course, there are other RSS readers and other kinds of news sites out there. But personally, I find the best way to consume a lot of news is to:

  1. Make it very easy and tempting, and
  2. Personalize the news sources so that I have a lot of stuff I like.
If anybody needs help finding specialized French news sources, I'd be happy to help (as would many other people here, I'm sure).

And now I would like ask for help myself. :-) Are there any especially beginner-friendly Spanish news sources that people would recommend? I've found News in Slow Spanish, which looks very friendly at my level. Is there anything else out there that I should look at?
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby iguanamon » Sun Nov 01, 2015 11:36 pm

emk wrote:...And now I would like ask for help myself. :-) Are there any especially beginner-friendly Spanish news sources that people would recommend? I've found News in Slow Spanish, which looks very friendly at my level. Is there anything else out there that I should look at?

For alternative news in Spanish, French, Portuguese and many other languages (all the biggies and several smaller ones) I recommend Global Voices en Español. The articles are either original or translated and the originals usually have translations into French and English, so, you could make your own short parallel texts. You'll see a link off to the right with the other language translations. There's almost always an English translation.

For news from a US perspective, but with more of an international focus- the Associated Press en Español has a good, regularly updated site with the English originals/translations available at the English site. I easily made over 100 parallel texts for a friend who is learning Spanish. They also have a sports, business and entertainment section. For more advanced listening (from a US perspective) Buenos Días América has podcasts downloadable in mp3. I listen to RFI (Radio France Internationale) in Portuguese every day (no transcript and find it to be quite high quality with good international coverage. It's also available in podcast in Spanish. This won't be like what you experienced with their news in Français Facile. You'll have the chance to get used to the newscasters, but there is no transcript.

Democracy Now! en Español is most definitely not "news in slow Spanish" but it is free and comes with a transcript and the English original/transcript is just a click away to make your own parallel texts. Be warned, it is left leaning, but hey, you live in Vermont :)

BBC Mundo used to broadcast daily to Latin America but stopped a few years ago. They shifted their focus to their website which I find to be a great resource for keeping informed on the latest in Latin America and the world. While some articles are translated, many others are original.

My own Spanish news comes from El Nuevo Herald in Miami, El País in Spain, the AP en español, El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico and BBC Mundo in print. I enjoy watching TVE Telediario from Spain occasionally and CNN en Español regularly. A good video newscast that can be treated as audio is Euronews- it has a transcript and the same newscast is available in many other languages as well.

It goes without saying that all of these outlets have a great twitter feed and mobile apps. This is pretty much how I access my varied sources. I also have access via my phone apps, television and car radio.

During the early stages of learning a language, a parallel text can be a huge help. The news is varied and changes every day so there's a great opportunity to learn new vocabulary in context and through repetition of an ongoing story. If you choose sources to listen to where you can make a parallel text you can learn to read and listen to native-intended material. There are many ways a learner (emk already knows this) can use a parallel text and a transcript to help learn a language.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby kujichagulia » Mon Nov 02, 2015 12:58 am

If you are learning Japanese, NHK WEB EASY provides daily news articles written in easier Japanese. Furigana is written above the kanji, and you can get the definition (in Japanese) of some key words by hovering over them with the mouse cursor.

Similar to what iguanamon said above, the Japanese version of Global Voices tends to have some interesting articles, and many of them have links to the original articles in English and/or other languages, which you can use as parallel text.

You can find video news clips at News24.

Finally, NHK releases a ton of news podcasts daily, although they tend to be dry.  If you prefer just one daily news podcast, try the news podcast from the Korean broadcaster KBS.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby tomgosse » Mon Nov 02, 2015 2:25 pm

Tom's Silly Question Of The Day:

After I read, listen to, or watch a news report, what do I do? Should I just tell you that I did so? Post a link to it? Write, or record a report on it? Sorry if I'm too slow witted to understand, but sometimes (okay, most of the time :? ) I get confused about challenges.

Thank you for your patience,
Tom
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby Ogrim » Mon Nov 02, 2015 2:47 pm

I very much like the idea of this challenge, and I am one who do not normally take part in challenges as I am not too fond of quantitative goals. However, I might take part in this one, as I read a lot of news in any case, but I do have a few questions about how it works:

Written news articles can vary greatly in length, from short notices to a several (A4) pages. How do we calculate the number of news items on this basis?
If the goal is 60 news items in a month, can that be 60 in different languages? Can I add articles I read in Russian, podcasts in Catalan and TV news in Romansh or German to get to 60 items or must I stick to just one language at the time? How do I count watching an evening news programme (like the "journal 20 heures" on French TV) which lasts 45 minutes or an hour?

I also have the same silly question as Tom, by the way.
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby emk » Mon Nov 02, 2015 5:16 pm

Ogrim wrote:Written news articles can vary greatly in length, from short notices to a several (A4) pages. How do we calculate the number of news items on this basis?

For the original Super Challenge, we had the same issue with "pages", which which are much longer in adult books than children's books. But this mostly worked out OK, because the people around A2 tended to read books with really short pages, and the people closer to C1 mostly read adult books with much longer pages. I don't know whether that would help here, but at least personally, I intended to read shorter articles in Spanish and longer articles in French.

I just decided to invest US$13.90 to get the full transcripts for News in Slow Spanish, Latino version. It looks like I get four articles a week. So here's what I've read / listened to over the last two days, just to see if I've got the general idea:

  1. ES: Cuatro países latinoamericanos van a las urnas. A nice overview of recent elections, and I'm surprised that I can already enjoy this news at my current level. Apparently I get four new articles each week? Seems reasonable, given my level.
  2. FR: A 13-minute segment of the Les Années lumière podcast about the recently-awarded Nobel prize for DNA repair. The Quebec accents weren't too challenging for this segment, but the one right before was pretty rough.
  3. FR: Suivre une classe prépa, c’est comme « rattraper un TGV » (one of my 15 free Le Monde articles this month). This is about the French preparatory schools which students attend to get ready for the grandes écoles, the most prestigious universities in France. I re-learned the word bachotage "cramming", and I remembered how annoying I find the flowery sentence fragments in Le Monde. But the article itself offered a great glimpse into how the "elite" part of the French system works:
    C’est d’une métaphore ferroviaire que Thomas B, 21 ans, use pour décrire les rails que doivent emprunter les étudiants qui s’engagent en classe prépa : « En début de première année, nous courrons après un train à vapeur, en fin de sup, il faut suivre un TER et pour les concours, nous devons rattraper un TGV. »
    I also learned that a TER is a train express régional. Lots of great little cultural details here.
  4. FR: Predicsis, la startup bretonne qui a séduit Amazon Web Services lors du salon ReInvent. Maddyness is specialist news site that reports on French technology startups. This was a short interview with the founder of Predicsis, which is trying to use modern AI technologies to analyze customer behavior (retention, upsell, fraud). France actually has a ridiculous number of seed-stage software startups, but there's historically been trouble getting Series A funding. And Predicsis, like most French tech startups, is obsessed with entering the US market as soon as possible. I really need to keep track of which of these companies get funded, and see if anybody needs an occasional US software consultant who speaks French. :-)
aokoye, are these the sorts of articles and news sources you were thinking about?
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Re: Monthly News Challenge

Postby aokoye » Tue Nov 03, 2015 3:50 am

tomgosse wrote:Tom's Silly Question Of The Day:

After I read, listen to, or watch a news report, what do I do? Should I just tell you that I did so? Post a link to it? Write, or record a report on it? Sorry if I'm too slow witted to understand, but sometimes (okay, most of the time :? ) I get confused about challenges.

Thank you for your patience,
Tom


Oh no worries - I'd say just write that you've read, listened to, or watched it. I would also encourage you to link to it if it isn't political in nature/controversial (which I realize can cover a lot of things - I'd defer to emk's post on the matter). Don't worry about being confused - I'm totally up for questions even if I only getting to them at the end of my day :)
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