Around the time I reached the last section of Minna no Nihongo Shokyuu 1 (N5 text). I have a background in Chinese so had more kanji knowledge than expected for N5, but grammar-wise this was just after learning plain form...

I started with a manga, Shirokuma Cafe vol 1, that had full furigana and a Wanikani book club. The latter means that for each chapter, there was already a crowdsourced vocabulary list and people discussing the contents in the forum thread. Thus the issues about dictionary lookups or not were minimized. At that level, I found it hard going, but did manage to finish the volume, and it was a great motivation to continue progressing in my studies.

Would recommend this route to start out. As a side note, you don't have to have a Wanikani account to access these.