Back to the Nikkei podcast

I quit listening to the Kiku-Nikkei podcast when it switched to paid mode. I am back, and would argue that any advanced learner of the Japanese  language wanting to beef up competency at using sophisticated jargon in all realm of business invest in the monthly fee of 500 yens. For 20 minutes of voiced over readings of the Nikkei daily articles, it is a bargain. You get 20 minutes of content to shadow every business day. One noticeable thing that changed with the paid version is the speed, which is quite slow and very clearly spelled out. This makes for good prosody audio workbook. The tone, depending on the speaker of the day, can be North Korean like, or pretty much palatable, and I suspect that automaton voice of early this week got the ax for a more sympathetic human.

There is of course the argument that read aloud articles are not the way people talk in daily business. And this is true, but the purpose is not to develop business communication skill in a direct a manner. Daily life will take care of it. The true purpose is to strengthen the competence to heavily lace one's own speech with correct, specific vocabulary that makes the difference. In the context of interpretation, but also in the context of a liaison interpreter for business show of assurance and confidence, this is mandatory. Together with the web version of the Nikkei, this makes for a tremendously powerful, cheap quasi-manual of advanced Japanese for business at large.