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 News becomes outdated almost immediately, so new material has to be produced continuously.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.
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.
