Words in the news

I have a suggestion for a new set of language courses: words in the news.

I’ve studied a few languages and become sufficiently fluent to be a good tourist. But I can’t read a newspaper, or watch the news on TV or listen to it on the radio.

Why not? Because it has a specialized vocabulary: place names, the names of governmental departments, words associated with natural disaster, and many words for violence in all its forms.

Still, this is a fairly limited set of words, perfect for Memrise.

As always, we’re interested in the “90% rule”, meaning give us the words that will let us understand 90% of what we see or hear.

Good point. I’ve been looking for news sites with limited vocab to close the gap between survival vocab and ‘words in the news’ vocab - found English ones, but never in other languages. Then it would be easy to build upon.
Slightly off topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/english/features/news-report
But you are asking for the vocab of course.
Does any of these two or three lists help:
http://ieltsliz.com/newspaper-vocabulary/ (though short, a not so much the news itself)
https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/183710
https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/in-news-natural-disasters

you have to give “news” in the search box without selecting a language to learn (https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/?q=news)

Italian: courses by Patrizioso for English speakers, for German speakers of Ang and one of myself, for French there are several

Korean: https://www.memrise.com/course/437690/news-in-korean-ttmik/

For Arabic there are tons of them

FarsiPersian has also a number of

JTalk online, and Akemi-Inoue and crystal92 and others have for Japanese etc (https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/japanese/?q=news)

etc

1 Like

Thanks for all the feedback. I’m specifically looking for German, French and Spanish news vocabularies with English as the native language. I’ve visited several sites that offer “slow news” and news vocabularies, including Deutsche Welle and ThoughtCo. Unfortunately, they lack what Memrise offers – smart flash cards – and I lack the talent to build courses myself for Memrise.

1 Like