Reading About the Pandemic in Japanese

With the sudden rise in COVID-19 cases in Japan over the past few weeks, I have once again found myself harvesting news reports for any tidbit that would induce just the right combination of apprehension and relief. My nihongo listening comprehension is not good enough to sit in front of a TV newscast and get what I need, so I try to extract what I can from written online news articles.

My news website of choice is NHK News Web (https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/). While perhaps not as in-depth as some of the other outlets in Japan, it does have the advantage of being highly repetitive when it comes to word usage. This is especially true of coronavirus reporting, where the editors of some articles appear to simply copy and paste the latest data from their spreadsheets into a ready-made article template. For someone like me who is still acquiring the language, parsing articles in a common, consistent format increases the chance that I will understand the world around me.

A good example is the daily roundup of infection statistics that comes out sometime after midnight each day. The post released this past Sunday morning, covering data from Saturday, November 21, starts out with this gloomy news.

21日はこれまでに全国で2596人の感染が発表されています。また21日は、大阪府で5人、北海道で3人、埼玉県で1人、愛知県で1人、東京都で1人、熊本県で1人、の合わせて12人の死亡の発表がありました。

This roughly translates into the following.

It was announced that for [November] 21st, as of right now, 2,596 people were infected across the entire country. It was also announced that there were a total of 12 deaths on that day: 5 in Osaka, 3 in Hokkaido, 1 in Saitama, 1 in Aichi, 1 in Tokyo, and 1 in Kumamoto.

It’s grim stuff, to be sure. But because NHK emits basically the same opening paragraphs every day, I’ve started to glean the basic facts via skimming instead of by plodding through each and every word. Later paragraphs are not as easy, as NHK changes up the supporting content regularly.

Here is a list of some common words that frequently show up in reports about the current pandemic.

• 新型（しんがた）コロナウイルス = novel coronavirus, sometimes abbreviated as コロナ
• 全国（ぜんこく） = the whole country (referring to Japan in this case)
• 合（あ）わせて = taken all together, good for adding up numerical totals
• 発表（はっぴょう） = announcement, often as 発表されています, “has been announced”
• 注意（ちゅうい） = caution, warning
• 確認（かくにん） = confirmation
• 過去（かこ）最多（さいた） = highest ever recorded; the 過去 part means “the past”
• 10歳（さい）未満（みまん） = under age 10
• 年代（ねんだい）別（べつ） = by (10-year) age groups, used for age-related charts
• 増加（ぞうか） = increase or growth
• 患者（かんじゃ） = (medical) patient
• 無（む）症状（しょうじょう）者（しゃ） = a person showing no symptoms
• 軽症（けいしょう）者（しゃ） = person with minor illness
• 重症（じゅうしょう） = serious illness or symptoms
• 感染（かんせん）者数（しゃす） = number of infected individuals
• 治療（ちりょう） = medical treatment
• 医療（いりょう）施設（しせつ） = medical facility
• 入院（にゅういん） = admitted to the hospital
• 退院（たいいん） = recovered or discharged from the hospital
• 死亡（しぼう） = deaths
• 拡大（かくだい）防止（ぼうし） = preventing the spread, of the virus in this case
• マスク着用（ちゃくよう） = wearing a mask
• 自粛（じしゅく） = self-restraint
• 不要（ふよう）不急（ふきゅう） = nonessential and non-urgent

If news about the virus is not your study material of choice, NHK covers all kinds of goings-on, and the opening paragraphs frequently offer that same level of straightforward structure that can make reading just a bit easier. The broadcaster also offers NHK News Web EASY, a selection of daily articles written in やさしい日本語（にほんご） with foreigners and elementary school students in mind.

[Image Credits: イモ之助/photo-ac.com]