It was extremely difficult, but possible with a dictionary, to understand ~60% of what was being said around the end of Genki 1, and it became much easier to handle around the end of Genki 2, maybe around ~80% comprehension. Most grammar on the site is simplistic but they don’t pull punches with the kanji and strange vocabulary, so if your Japanese skills aren’t evenly balanced it will prove challenging to read in some way (either due to the grammar or kanji). I wouldn’t use it as a benchmark of your progress though, since the news often covers topics that are likely rarely discussed in everyday life unless your day job is political science.
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One thing that makes NHK easy approachable for beginners is not so much the vocab (you’ll have to look stuff up all the time as a beginner anyway, and lookups can be instant with browser plugins), it’s that the sentences are very short. Japanese loves “Russian doll” sentences that stack on top of each other and it’s really hard to deal with those at first because by the time you reach the end of a long sentence you forgot where you started.
The drawback is that, as a result, it sounds a bit unnatural. I’m not very good at Japanese but even I can tell that NHK easy sounds a bit “off” compared to the Japanese I’m used to reading.
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I must add though that I really miss the feature they used to have when they had some words underscored – and you could hover at those words and read their dictionary definitions in Japanese… I hope they would return it back… On the bright side, the news are now voiced by real people (instead of voice synthesizer that they used to have)…
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Hmmm…
I ventured into NHK Easy when I was level 7, and had just started going through Genki 1. Kept at it until… level 12 or 13.
The grammar used and the sentence structure were simple enough… N5 maybe lower N4? And in the end that’s what did me in, because like @simias said at some point it started to feel too… simple, as in too stilted language.
There was also the matter of the articles being too short to be proper news reading, you’re definitely not getting full information so even if your aim is to read the news, NHK Easy is more like reading headlines/summaries than actual full-fledged journalism.
That said, vocab on the other hand I found to be too difficult at that point in time. My only source of vocab was WK and when you’re in the low levels (heck, even now with other stuff I’m reading!)… that’s really not enough. But then there’s of course stuff like Yomitan that will help power through those articles 
Anyway, I did switch from NHK Easy to Satori Reader and in hindsight, from a learning resource standpoint, the latter is much much more useful when you’re a beginner - should have started with it earlier.
Okay, it’s not free like NHK, but it got me into ‘proper’ reading and I’ll heartily recommend it to anyone who’s just starting out 
At some point (once my reading speed and comprehension increase to decent levels) I’ll go back to NHK, but the full-fledged version of it, as I do have an interest in the news. At the moment though, the wall of kanji there is still very scary
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Been finding this with lots of material too recently, especially kids books v light novels. Definitely feel like one marker of levelling up is how frightening pages and pages of text looks.
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I love to use markers that erases after some time. That way you can try the same text again after a long time and really feel how much you have improved
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Same reaction here. I’d tried it 2 years ago then again a year or maybe a few months ago but still can’t get into it. I’ve been at Lvl26 on WK for months as I ramped up on my grammar via BunPro. I passed N5 last Dec and I’ve just finished Genki 1 with an online tutor. Out of curiosity, I looked at NHK News Easy again just now. I can say that I can recognize/understand more now but comprehension is not high enough yet. But oh boy, the amount of snow they’re getting!
When it comes to reading, I have realized (like others here) that WK is great with Kanji but take that away and I do not have great recall when I just see the furigana of kanji I already know. So some reading material that is furigana heavy/only is a bit frustrating. I am looking forward to one day using Satori reader as it can link to the kanji you know on WK via API but just don’t have the time for more reading, period. I’m focusing on grammar and speaking first. Once I finish Genki 2, I may reassess my next steps.
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