News broadcast in 'easy' Japanese?

Question

I was wondering if anybody knows about newscasts available some place on the net or shortwave radio in 'easy Japanese?' Several other countries (including US and France) have daily or weekly newscasts in a more 'accessible' version of their respective languages. What this means is that they use a deliberately limited vocabulary and also newscasters enunciate more clearly and they speak slower than regular newscasts. Here is an example of this done in French ('écouter' means listen and 'télécharger' means download).

http://www.rfi.fr/radiofr/statiques/journauxFrancaisFacile.asp

I did some Internet searches for Japanese version of such a thing - but so far come up dry. I found out that NHK posts their regular news broadcasts online (in Japanese as well as a host of other languages) but have not yet found a 'simplified Japanese' version of news. Does anybody happen to know if there is such a thing in Japanese and how to find it? (done by NHK or otherwise).

Thank you,
Michael

Answer 1

Try newscasts aimed at the hearing impaired. They often have simplified language with lots of captions. They also often go into certain terms in more detail, which is very helpful for the language learner. I think it's called "shuwa news" -- it's on NHK, anyway.