Recording Japanese web news for Intermediate practice

[mikuji]

If you feel ready to be stretched by 'real' material but would still like the luxury of repeated viewing until you get the gist, plus some written material to help you get what the subject is all about, then I recommend you get the following free software:

http://sdp.ppona.com/

which can record video clips from the web in .wvm format. You can view them with windows media player/realplayer etc

I have used to record short video clip news from ABC (www.asahi.co.jp) at this site:

http://webnews.asahi.co.jp/

I have not tried with other sites so far.
Incidentally, this morning (GMT) I got broken links from this page but it worked well yesterday.

You need to install and open the SDP then you need to find out the web address of the streaming content which the program asks for when you press 'open'. I find out the name of the specific news file by right clicking on the icon of one of the player under the picture and selecting 'save link' then copying the filename and adding it to the site name- you may need to experiment a bit to find the best way to do this.

The videos are short and are accompanied by some subtitles.They also have a short text on the side with the summary of the story for vocabulary preparation.

I hope you find it useful and enjoy the videos

Mikuji