I am currently going through genki 1 and am going to get a kanji learning book soon so I understand I’m not at a level to start anything really lol but I’m curious when it should be done. I’ve seen lots of recommendations for beginner things like playing Mario odyssey in Japanese or simple books and not sure when exactly something like that should be tried
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When you can go through it without having to look up half the stuff you come across. The specifics then depend on your tolerance for dictionary lookups.
I’m almost through with Genki 1 and am very familiar with the N5 kanji, so currently I use the Satori Reader app. I select the easy versions of stories and it has been good practice for learning grammar and vocabulary. It sounds like we’re at about the same place so it might be a good resource for you too.
If you’re going through genki, you’ll soon be able to get the genki graded readers: 24 books in easy Japanese that match each lesson of the textbook ([https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/uyvhq3/new_graded_readers_for_those_studying_with_genki/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/uyvhq3/new_graded_readers_for_those_studying_with_genki/)). They will be published in January 2023.
There were some exerpts available until recently and they all look a bit like these ones: [https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/#l0](https://tadoku.org/japanese/free-books/#l0) Feel free to try them out, they are perfect to start reading with if you already know hiragana and katakana.
I find that I can start reading simple texts after MNN 2 (~ Genki 2). Individual words is easy to look up in a dictionary but I found it much easier to read when I knew enough grammar.