Can real news be simplified for beginner learners?

Can we simplify real news stories for beginners so that they can gain access to the language through everyday events? There is little of this type of content available. Perhaps because creating it is difficult. News becomes outdated almost immediately, so new material has to be produced continuously. At the same time, simplifying complex ideas without losing the story is challenging. In this post I will demonstrate my approach to this.

In my Japanese language learning experience, beginner level content was all stories about tea ceremony, or temples in Kyoto. Maybe it looked at the behaviours and pastimes of the Japanese, for example how they bow when they meet, or the tradition of eating rice cake at new year. I guess the thinking when creating beginner material like this is “if you are learning the language of a country, the first thing you should do is get to know it.” But should beginners have to learn with Japan-specific cultural topics? How about for learners who want to read about the wider world using Japanese?

Let's take a random sentence from an international news article and see the challenges and opportunities that are present in trying to grade it for lower levels. I'll use English for the examples, but the underlying approach is the same regardless of the target language. This sentence was taken from a headline article in a popular English language online newspaper covering wildfires in Europe in summer 2026:

Droughts have usually been linked to low rainfall, but western Europe’s most recent winter was a wet one.

Breaking this down, the first word is our first big challenge: Droughts. High intermediate is likely the level where learners want to be learning this word, but it can be broken down for lower levels:

Low intermediate (around JLPT level 3), not enough water due to a period of little or no rain.

Beginner (JLPT N4): people cannot get water because there is no rain. Most of the water has gone.

Starter (JLPT N5): people need water. There is no water. There was no rain. Now there is no water.

The approach I have taken here to grading a single word that is out of level is to define it, making sure the definition does not contain language that is more difficult than the level it is intended for. So the grading - or defining - uses simpler words and grammar as the level decreases.

How about the rest of the sentence? This example is particularly tricky because we are using the concept of the lack of rain to define drought, but in this sentence the article is discussing how the current situation runs counter to ordinary assumptions about rain and drought.

Let's tackle the next idea contained in the sentence: “usually been linked to low rainfall”. This language is probably OK as it is for lower intermediate, so let's try and simplify it for beginner and starter levels:

Beginner: Rain brings water to places. Often, when there is no rain, there is no water.

Starter: When it rains, there is water. When it doesn't rain, there is no water. This is normal.

The most difficult thing to get across here is the concept of usually, an abstract concept of time. I think the sentences above cover the essence of the meaning contained though. Does the starter version lose nuance? For sure, but we are preserving the core idea of the story and communicating it to the starter learner using language they can understand.

The final clause of this sentence is probably the easiest to break down, even though it contains the most idiomatic phrase in the sentence, a wet one. This is the type of idiom it is good to be getting used to at high intermediate and advanced levels. At low intermediate we can go with:

it rained a lot,

beginner and starter possibly: lots of rain.

The other concepts can also easily be broken down. For western Europe we use the countries themselves at lower levels, France, Spain, Germany, etc. The important thing is to simply to preserve the idea of the location. Most beginners will recognise country names such as France, Spain and Germany more readily than western Europe. Last winter similarly is probably fine at beginner level and could be turned into winter 2025/6 or December, January, February 2025/26 for starter if it was felt the cognitive load was getting high.

So let's try and bring all this together and grade the sentence at each level:

Original sentence kept as it is for advanced:

Droughts have usually been linked to low rainfall, but western Europe’s most recent winter was a wet one.

Higher intermediate:

Droughts have usually been linked to low rainfall, but during western Europe’s most recent winter there was a lot of rain.

Lower intermediate:

When there is not enough water for people it is called a drought. Droughts usually happen because there has not been enough rain. However, last winter there was a lot of rain in western Europe.

Beginner:

Sometimes people do not have enough water. Recently this has been a problem in western Europe. Usually, this is a problem because there is not enough rain. But last winter, it rained a lot in western Europe.

Starter:

People in France, Spain and Germany need water. They do not have water now. It rained in December, January, and February in France, Spain and Germany. But people in these countries do not have water.

Here I have attempted to grade technical, abstract concepts like droughts and unusual scientific phenomena down to even starter level where a learner is familiarising themselves with the new language. The sentence becomes longer, and it needs to be broken down into more and more concrete chunks. Some of the nuance is lost along the way, admittedly. However, every simplification is a trade-off. You lose precision, but you gain accessibility. The challenge isn’t to preserve every detail. It’s to preserve the central idea. That’s why I believe the main idea can be portrayed and the learner can read about recent events in the target language.

So I believe it can be done technically. Whether it is economically viable at scale is another question. But I’d be interested to know whether there is much appetite for this type of content among beginner learners, especially in Japanese but for other languages too. My feeling is beginners don't need beginner topics. They simply need beginner language.

Here is the rest of the related paragraph. Anybody fancy taking a shot at grading this to lower levels?

The scientists said the climate crisis was redefining drought in Europe, with high temperatures the key factor this summer.

Today’s drought in western Europe is classified as “extreme” but would have been “moderate” in the world before the climate crisis, according to the analysis.

What should Japanese learners read? Following interests or building variety?

When choosing reading material for language learning, should we follow our interests or deliberately choose variety? It's a question I've found myself thinking about since launching Context Japanese.

Newspaper concept

One of the main ideas behind Context Japanese is that learners will enjoy language learning more—and stay motivated for longer—if they can read content that genuinely interests them at an appropriate level, rather than being limited to a fixed set of textbook topics. To make that possible, I wanted the site to offer a wide variety of topics. To achieve this, the concept of a newspaper with different article categories seemed a logical choice. A newspaper does not assume everyone wants to read the same thing. Different readers naturally gravitate towards different sections. It's still early and the data set is small, but I have been looking at user behaviour in relation to topic choice and some interesting insights are already visible.

Category selection

The first thing I have noticed is that users do not try to cover every category. Instead, they are selective and repeatedly choose the same categories. This is similar to how we might approach reading the news in our native tongue. We rarely approach news consumption in our first language by saying, "Today I should read one article from politics, one from science, one from sport and one from culture." We usually follow our curiosity. I often read the sports section and the top stories and perhaps some politics or business-related news, but rarely go into the health and lifestyle sections or arts and culture. One might expect that if you are using a site to learn a language, it would make sense to cover every category in order to expose yourself to the widest possible range of language. So far, that doesn't seem to be happening. 

Favoured topics

The behaviour of registered users already hints at a couple of interesting patterns. Users tend to gravitate towards one or two categories—we might assume these reflect their interests. One user, for example, has read eight articles, six of them in Arts & Culture and two in Lifestyle & Health, but none from the other seven categories. Another user has returned four times and on each occasion chosen a Science & Technology article without reading from another category. One more user has wider tastes, spreading their reading across five categories, but still ignoring the remaining four. Similarly, another user has chosen Lifestyle & Health for more than half of the articles they have read.

Possible implications for language learning

This data sets the scene well for the sort of investigations that could follow once there are more users on the site. I am interested in how topic choice affects learning, and whether there is a better approach: staying within the same topic area or deliberately varying it more widely. One possibility is that repeatedly reading the same type of content makes key nouns and phrases increasingly familiar. That removes one cognitive barrier and may allow learners to devote more attention to new grammar and unfamiliar ways of expressing ideas. Equally, it may be that different topics naturally expose learners to different vocabulary and grammatical patterns, making variety the more effective approach. That is something I would love to investigate further.

Let's take sport as an example. If you are a football fan, does it make sense to read football articles every day? You would probably become very familiar with words like match, player, controversy and dispute. That familiarity might free up enough attention to notice new grammar or unfamiliar turns of phrase. But what might you miss? Would you encounter words like research, which might appear regularly in Science & Technology articles, or bankrupt, which you might see more often in Business & Economics? Perhaps repeated exposure to one topic also means repeated exposure to particular grammar patterns and ways of expressing ideas.

Looking forward

As Context Japanese grows, I'm looking forward to revisiting these observations in six months' time to see whether they still hold. For now, I'm left with one question: should learners follow their curiosity, or deliberately push themselves towards unfamiliar topics? My instinct is that both have a role. Familiar topics may help learners build confidence and process language more easily, while variety may expose them to a wider range of vocabulary and structures. As Context Japanese grows, this is one of the questions I hope to explore further.

Six Months Building Context Japanese: Five Things I've Learnt

It's about six months since Context Japanese went live, so seems a good moment to pause and give an update. Here are five things I have learnt.

1. My concept has been validated

I'd define the concept as the provision of varied and fresh content that is adjusted to a range of learner levels that can maintain a regular reading habit will appeal to learners. Users have found the site organically online, signed up for accounts, and returned to use the site. The most encouraging sign isn't the number of users—it's that some of them came back. I had set myself the goal of having returning users within one year. Now I can add a number to that to adjust the goal. I would like to have a regular user base of 100 by the one year mark. I believe this is an achievable goal with some more proactive promotion and distribution of the site.

2. Topic sourcing is more challenging than article generation

One area of the app that is key to making the premise work is topic sourcing. I have found that using news APIs to source content is not the best method. News APIs are built for a different purpose. I can imagine they are excellent tools for sourcing information and articles on a particular topic. For example, if you want to track all the latest information in the agriculture industry in the United States, then a news API would be a good tool. For my purpose, sourcing a variety of content on a range of topics, they prove less useful. For this reason I have moved towards using rss feeds for the topic sourcing ahead of APIs. Doing this I am able to be more selective about the sites being used to source topics. The range is more limited, but this can be broadened over time with some investment in researching good feeds.

3. Lower level simplification seems harder (but is it?)

Grading lower level articles seem harder, however, it is possible that it is just a case of being able to see the areas that need to be improved more easily. I believe Context Japanese is a good tool for beginners. However, it is the intermediate plateau (which a motivated beginner can enter quite quickly) where I believe the main target audience for this product are. The main job of Context Japanese is to help learners move beyond the intermediate plateau and towards confident, independent reading. I believe that more work will be needed on the higher levels to make this a reality. I am not ready for that yet but am looking forward to the challenge still to come.

4. Hiragana v Kanji at the lower levels is a challenge

One unique challenge with Japanese is the alphabets. As a Japanese learner myself, I am aware of how intimidating kanji can be, but I am also aware of how confusing a wall of hiragana is. Japanese is quite unique in this sense (are there other languages that mix alphabets like this!?). Kanji are the most difficult of the three alphabets used, but if the text only uses one of the simpler phonetic alphabets, it can be really challenging to understand the meaning because it is difficult to parse where one word ends and another one begins. I believe beginners must get exposed to simple Kanji early and begin reading with these as they will do at higher levels or they will likely become disillusioned quickly. I have had differing experiences with the three AI providers I am using, with some more likely than others to throw out the hiragana wall. There are some articles still creeping through at N5 level like this and I have a few ideas about how to fix this.

5. Renaming the project changed how I think about it

Context Japanese is now the third and I think final name for the product. Yomu Yomu was cute, but I don't think it really embodied what the product is aiming to do. I prefer Context because it also guides my thinking about the future product roadmap while capturing the essence of how language is acquired through the app. The next function release I have in mind will really feed into this idea and compound the learning possible using the product.

Looking forward

So here we are. There are some interesting challenges ahead. The levelling, topic selection and ensuring a variety of content for all tastes, optimisation for traversing the plateau to name a few. I will explore all of these further in coming months. If I finish with one question from the areas I have outlined that I will look at next, it would be on the subject of topic v level? Which is more important for a learner trying to learn a language? Would you rather have a topic you weren't interested in, perfectly levelled for you to learn from? Or a topic you really were interested in that was either too difficult or too easy for you? Which would you prefer? Something to think about.

New name, same mission

I decided to change the name of the site. It was a case of now or never really, and an encounter with a Reddit post about the other ‘Yomu Yomu’ app made up my mind. The name was neat and cool for Japanese, but it didn’t really capture the essence of the site, nor did it have the capacity to scale with my vision to expand beyond Japanese as the site grows. I considered a number of options before landing on my preferred choice. The site is now called Context. Here's why:

Early contenders (Silk Road Detour)

I was thinking about the intermediate plateau and how that is one of the guiding principles of the site - to help learners traverse this plateau. That got me thinking about one of my favourite concepts in Asian history: the Silk Road and the caravans that crossed the mountains and deserts transporting goods and culture between east and west. This gave me a few interesting names and I was playing around with the idea of the Taklamakan desert. Probably mainly because I think Taklamakan is a great word - if you know how to pronounce it - but also because it affords plenty of opportunity for creating word play. I tried taklaman, taklacan, taklavan. Then I was thinking about Roman tableaus being good symbols of reading and merging that in and came up with tablavan - Taklamakan, tableaus, caravan! It all seemed to fit together nicely, and I was leaning towards this as the site name.

Key issue

However, there was a problem with this line of thought and naming… The problem was the name didn’t really explain what the product did/does. Starting out with a new product and trying to gain traction and not having a marketing team behind me, I sensed that having a name that helped explain the product was possibly more important than a fancy, cool name that I liked, so I went back to the drawing board. After some brainstorming, with the help of a couple of AI sites, I settled on a couple of names that better represented the product. First I was considering Column. This resonated with the idea of a newspaper and articles, and also sounded serious which is one of the site's brand elements. I even began thinking of branded columns representing progress bars in the app (a bit gimmicky thinking back now). 

The new name

Then the AI was pushing the idea of Context a lot. At first I wasn’t so keen on this as it seemed a bit removed from the idea of graded reading news site. However, it occurred to me that I wanted to add in a vocabulary tool - indeed I have already built the tool and just need to plug it in to the site. This added to the sense of learning in context which is core to graded reading. My vocabulary tool will use example sentences and real world media to reinforce this. Therefore the name seemed to be the right choice.

I checked availability of suitable domains and was able to purchase context-japanese.com for the site. This will be the first site with other languages to follow. Yomuyomu.io had been rebranded and moved to context-japanese.com. From now on, it's Context.  

Everything else is the same. Same site, same mission, same commitment to helping you read authentic Japanese.