I’m subscribed to the official YouTube channels for a few Japanese news outlets, and I find that, for every 10 depressing stories and 10 kinda boring ones, there’s one or 2 really cute ones, whether it’s a wholesome thing with animals (I love cats so cat videos are the best), or something like, really innocuous, like a story about a strawberry farm and how all these different products are being made from the special berries harvested from there (I just watched one about that so I’m using it as an example lol). I saw this other great one about a day where meat was on sale and there were massive lines around the block to get into delis (sales seem so popular in Japan from the news stories I’ve seen! So many people in line to get a good deal on eggs it’s crazy!).
If not from the title or thumbnail, I can always tell immediately what kind of story it’ll be (is it about food / culture / cute animals, or is it about war and pestilence) based on the tone of the announcer. Even a relatively “boring” story is entertaining to me if the announcer’s voice is super relaxing to listen to or a super over the top ridiculous tone, etc. My YouTube subscription feed is like 90% Japanese news stories (even though I only end up watching such a small portion) so even if it’s a playlist that’s not currently being updated, and just has, idk, 50+ mundane / cute / cool new gadget etc news stories, even ones from years ago, that works plenty fine for me, it doesn’t have to be *NEW* news; I saw a great one the other day of a cat jumping out of a window like 20 stories up on a building and sticking the landing unharmed, and that was news from 6 months ago I think. If there isn’t a playlist like that I guess I’ll have to make one lol.
I guess a news outlet that pretty much exclusively reports on cute stuff / innocuous stuff / wholesome stuff works too. I hadn’t considered that one might exist, I just had imagined a playlist with stories from many different outlets jumbled together. Also, admittedly, I don’t think I’m going to be getting a very realistic “natural-sounding” listening experience from a goofy voice. So like, goofiness in moderation is ideal lol
*TLDR: looking for a YouTube playlist with clips from Japanese news outlets that are cute, interesting or funny with a light tone so that I can practice my listening. The news stories don’t have to be recent, I just want to listen to natural (as natural as someone can sound reading a script or from a teleprompter, but natural enough) Japanese speech with something wholesome to look at. 9/10 stories in my YouTube feed have 「死亡」in their title and not 「猫」. I just wanna see cats and stories about sunflowers, man :(*
I appreciate the help <3
2 comments
I’m not sure if this could be useful, but our Japanese teacher often used [NHK Easy](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/) for us, since its targeted at children, and often has either a video or audio file attached maybe it could be useful?
I switched to [HTB](https://www.youtube.com/@htbnews/featured) Hokkaido news for that very reason. ANN News was full of major international news stories while HTB had a mix of local reports about the weather, stray bears, apartment fires and car crashes, baby pandas, Coronavirus stats, etc. So a mix but no major international stuff.
And the ANN YouTube channel plays an annoyingly repetitive piano tune whenever they stop to show the weather temps, which I assume was an ad break if you were watching it on TV in Japan.