How to read NHK Easy News on your iPhone
Written by Darren Nah, who builds Toku Reader. Checked September 2026.
NEWS WEB EASY is NHK’s news rewritten in simpler Japanese, with ふりがな over the kanji and, on many articles, a recording you can play. It is free, it is real news rather than a textbook, and a new set goes up on weekdays. It is the single best free thing on the Japanese internet for a learner.
This page teaches a method for reading it. It does not copy NHK’s articles, and neither does the app — you read them at NHK, where they are published.
The problem with reading it in Safari
NHK’s own page will show you the readings, which solves half the problem. It will not tell you what a word means. So you end up with a second tab open on a dictionary, typing in kanji you cannot type, and by the third word the article has stopped being a thing you are reading and become a thing you are processing.
The method
- Open Toku Reader and go to the web reader.
- Paste the address of the article — or, from Safari, use the share button and send the page to Toku Reader.
- Turn readings on. ふりがな appears over the kanji, per character rather than smeared across the whole word.
- Read. When a word stops you, tap it: the reading, the meaning, the pitch accent, and the plain form if it is conjugated.
- Tap save on the ones that matter. They go into review with the sentence they came from, and come back before you forget them.
Do it every day, not for long
One article a day beats five on a Sunday, and NHK publishes on weekdays, so the habit builds itself. Read the article once without tapping anything and see how much survives. Then read it again and tap. The gap between those two readings is the honest measure of where you are.
What makes it easier, so you know what you are skipping
NHK writes these articles with shorter sentences, common words in place of rare ones, and a reading over every kanji. What it does not do is change the grammar much, which is why Easy News is genuinely useful rather than a toy: the sentence patterns are the ones you will meet everywhere else. When you can read one of these without tapping, you can read a great deal of ordinary Japanese with tapping, and that is a much smaller step than it feels like.
When Easy stops being easy
The same method works on the ordinary NHK site, and on any other Japanese page: a blog, a recipe, a Wikipedia article, a company’s about page. That is the point at which most people stop needing a graded reader at all — more about that here.
If you would rather listen than read, the same tap works inside a podcast: podcasts you can tap.