hwanghon:

Thank you for the love hahah!!!!

hm when I was around that level I read (and listened to) a lot talktomeinkorean material. I found their stuff to be really level appropriate and fun! They have a lot of news like material as well 🙂

News are by nature not very beginner/ lower intermediate level friendly, most foreign language classes start using news articles at upper intermediate level, but articles in the society/culture/weather section tend to be a lot easier, if you really want to read the news. 

I personally don’t see the point in starting to read the news at a super early level; sure there are some interesting articles, but all the texts that will take you a reasonable time to read will be fairly boring, and you’re not learning words and grammar structures that you can use in every day casual settings or in conversation, which is what you’ll be learning as a upper beginner/lower intermediate learner.

If you want to know what took my reading from high beginner to intermediate, it’s yonsei’s level 3 reading book. I know it’s not free, but it’s worth every cent. I’m fairly sure there are news like articles in there but most of the stories are everyday life oriented and very level appropriate, while still being engaging and challenging. 

Also, I hate being that person, but topik beginner 2/intermediate level reading texts are often based on recent news, while being level appropriate and short, so I recommend that. You can get past exams for free here.

I don’t have any specific tips, basically try engaging with the text until you feel confident that you can read it without looking up a word or grammar and to understand it. And if you come back to it in a week, that this will still be the case. That’s why them being fairly understandable and level appropriate is important to me. If I can’t understand 50% of the article already, I’d just leave it.

Note that not everybody has the same opinions on reading than me, I just like to read the text and not translate it word by word, so for me level appropriative-ness is very important. But not everybody thinks like that.