Short answer: mostly yes, but not with just any article, and not with zero vocabulary at all. A true beginner who's learned almost nothing yet will find unmodified real news genuinely frustrating rather than productive, and that frustration is a real signal worth listening to, not something to push through on willpower alone. But "wait until you're more advanced" is the wrong conclusion for most A1 and A2 learners, because the honest blocker usually isn't the news itself, it's which articles you start with.
What A1 and A2 actually mean for reading
The Council of Europe's own CEFR descriptors are specific about this. At A1, a reader can understand familiar names, words, and very simple sentences, the kind found on signs and simple notices. At A2, a reader can handle short, simple texts and find specific, predictable information in everyday material like schedules, menus, or short personal messages. Neither level describes reading a full news article start to finish and following every clause. That's a genuinely later-stage skill, and expecting it at A1 or A2 sets up a frustrating, inaccurate test of your progress.
What both levels do support is something narrower and still real: recognizing familiar words and short, direct sentence patterns in a text about a subject you already have some context for. That's a meaningfully different task from full comprehension, and it's exactly the task a beginner-appropriate news piece can be built around.
What to actually start with
Short wire-style briefs, two or three sentences reporting one fact plainly, rather than long-form analysis or opinion pieces. A brief has less to parse and a more predictable structure: who did what, when, where.
Stories you already know the outline of. A story you've already read about in your own language, a major sports result, a well-known event, a weather situation you lived through, gives you context to lean on. You're not decoding the plot from scratch, you're recognizing familiar information in unfamiliar words, which is a much more manageable task at A1 and A2 than reading genuinely new information cold.
Topics with concrete, everyday vocabulary: weather, sports scores, simple local announcements. These use direct, high-frequency words rather than the abstract or specialized vocabulary that policy or opinion writing leans on.
What to genuinely avoid for now
Long-form analysis, opinion columns, and satire all depend on background knowledge, implication, and tone that a beginner reader can't access yet, no matter how good the sentence-level decoding is. These aren't a matter of pushing through more slowly, they require inference skills that come later. Trying them at A1 or A2 is the scenario most likely to produce real discouragement, not productive struggle.
A quick, honest self-test
If you can pick out the basic subject, verb, and object in a short, simple sentence, and you can roughly follow a story you already know the shape of even with unfamiliar words scattered through it, you're ready to start now, not wait. If a short brief on a familiar topic still reads as an unbroken wall of unfamiliar words with nothing to hold onto, building a small core vocabulary first, a few hundred of the most common words in the language, will make that same brief click in a way pushing through it right now probably won't.
Where B1 fits into this
B1, the level most self-taught and app-taught learners reach after several months of consistent effort, is where the CEFR grid starts describing genuine independent reading: understanding texts made mainly of everyday, high-frequency language, following the description of events without needing every word pre-taught. A1 and A2 aren't a waiting room before that becomes possible, they're the stage where the specific habits, leaning on context, recognizing familiar words fast, tolerating some unknown vocabulary without stopping, actually get built. Skipping straight from drills to B1-level unmodified news without that earlier practice tends to feel like a much harder jump than it needs to.
The actual value of starting early
Starting at A1 or A2 with the right article types isn't about rushing ahead of your level, it's about getting real exposure to how the language is actually written well before you'd otherwise encounter it, which is exactly the exposure that closes the gap app-based drilling alone doesn't. The goal at this stage isn't full comprehension, it's building the pattern recognition that makes B1 reading feel like a continuation of what you're already doing, not a wall you hit later with no preparation for it.