kelvin921019 wrote:If you are looking for listening-reading practice, you can try Satori Reader. It has some free content and all sorts of reading materials from short stories to sample dialogues.
crush wrote:I've found the news super boring and draining to read. I just started reading Harry Potter in Japanese. I converted it to an HTML file and use Yomichan's pop-up dictionary to quickly look things up. I'm familiar with the story so even if i can't understand everything, i can still enjoy going through it. Perhaps you could try something similar, reading a translation of a book you've read (perhaps one you've read more than once) and enjoyed in Japanese.
My main criteria are to have quality (i..e not AI) English translations available, and the ability to easily look up words and grammar points, ideally without having to install a browser extension like Yomichan.
Watanoc sort of had this, which is why I tried it for so long. It has English translations of each paragraph, and you can mouseover (most of) the words to get definitions and grammar explanations. However, the English translations are often imcomplete and very loose, sometimes ignoring entire sentences of the Japanese text. The main reason I gave up though was that when I switched to the N4 tagged articles, the popup definitions became sparser and sparser. Typically, half the words in the article would not have definitions available, including lots of words I wasn't familiar with, so that's why I gave up.
Unfortunately, NHK News Easy doesn't even have any of this. I've tried copy pasting the text into Jisho and Google Translate to kind of make up for it, but Jisho doesn't understand context, so the definitions it supplies are less accurate, and it's almost hopeless when it comes to grammar. I've also noticed cases where it fails to even parse the word boundaries correctly, leading to gibberish suggestions.