I’d really recommend NHK News Web Easy articles. However, you may find even those really hard initially, and even for someone like me with almost no issues with kanji – I already spoke Chinese when I started Japanese – I needed to get used to sentence structure. Initially, you’ll probably feel the need to translate almost everything, or at least to find some way to figure out where all the sentence components are. That’s completely normal. Keep at it, and you’ll eventually figure it out. Nonetheless, if you’re completely stuck on even NHK News Web Easy articles (because I mean, you do need some grammatical knowledge for that, and I’ve just looked at Minna no Nihongo, another popular beginners’ textbook – my Japanese teacher is asking advanced students like me to prepare a possible lesson plan for the rest – and it really does take quite a few lessons to get through all the basic knowledge you’d need to get through even an ‘Easy’ article), then what I’d suggest is two things:
- Do something that’s exactly at your level, that will simply require you to reapply your knowledge in a slightly different context. I think that’s good practice, and will help you get used to understanding things while strengthening what you already know. You can try using these free courses from NHK:
Learn Japanese - Reliable and practical language learning programs | NHK WORLD-JAPAN
I’d suggest using the ‘beginner/elementary’ courses as reading and listening practice, especially the conversation courses. - Immerse yourself in something you enjoy, and for which you can check what you understand, even if you can’t understand much. My example for this? Subtitled anime. English subtitles are fine. How can you do it? Really just watch and listen. Your ears will get used to identifying individual sounds and kana. Listen out for words you know, but don’t worry too much about not understanding. All you need to do is get a feel for the structure that you’re picking up, like ‘Oh, there’s a けど there, so that’s a “but”, meaning there’s probably some contrast… oh, look, there’s a “but” in the subtitles too! And she’s saying あたし, while he’s saying おれ, so they’re talking about themselves, and maybe they’re supposed to be stereotypically cutesy/macho?’ Try to enjoy the content, and allow yourself to be proud of what you’re able to hear, because you’re putting in effort to improve, and you are progressing.
I used both of these strategies at one point, and in some sense concurrently, because I was reading my textbook passages and dialogues on my own as much as possible in order to see if I could work them out (I checked the translations afterwards), and then watching anime for fun after I was done with studying. I found that they both helped me a lot, and very seriously, to this day, I think a big reason why I can understand things faster when I hear them than I can read or speak is that I’ve just had so much practice absorbing Japanese sounds at this point (I watched a slapstick Japanese comedy anime on loop for six months for fun) that capturing sounds is rarely the problem: knowing the words I hear is.
As for this, it really depends on you. How do you learn? I don’t mean this in the sense of ‘visual, auditory or kinaesthetic?’ because whether or not such classifications are myths aside, that’s not really the point. Generally, how do you manage to get things to stick in your head? How do you remember things best? Try to make use of what you know about yourself to shape your study methods.
For me, I hate flashcards, and I also consider short translations to be extremely reductionist, so I stay far away from SRSes, even though I know they are supported by research and are helpful for many people. Regular revision is a good thing. However, really… it depends on you.
I remember things when I understand them deeply and can envision them more or less however I like. That or I create mnemonics, but even then, they’re often based on something I already remember well, or something I understand about what I’m trying to remember.
How I memorise things, with examples
For example, the cobalt column of the periodic table is cobalt, rhodium, iridium and meitnerium. CoRhIrMt. How did I remember that? Well, I know Meitner is a female scientist, and it happens that I knew this amazing female physics teacher, so I used her surname to help me remember Co and Mt. RhIr sounds like “rire”=‘to laugh’ in French (I’m studying in France), so I just imagined my teacher laughing. I remember because I understand. I give what I need to remember meaning. That’s how it works for me. Therefore, when I read and run into something I don’t know, unless I’m tired or feeling lazy, I don’t just look up one definition: I check what the word means, and I look at example sentences to see how it works in Japanese. That’s how I lock it in. Then I just go away and other stuff. Does it stick? Usually, yes, but sometimes I forget. That’s OK though: I just do the same thing, but make a greater effort and focus on the things in the definition I didn’t understand the first time. Eventually, unless the word is so rare I never see it, I stop forgetting. Oh, also, sometimes, purely out of interest, I recall the words I find intriguing of my own accord, often because I expect them to be rare or because they were a challenge to memorise. That’s my equivalent of an SRS review, I guess, except that I am the trigger: there is no flashcard, only my desire to challenge myself to remember everything I created to remember that word. My two favourite examples are うなされる（魘される）and なびく（靡く）, which I tackled on my mnemonics thread:
魘される（うなされる） : to have a nightmare and moan in one’s sleep because of it
靡く（なびく） – flutter, bend (in the wind, because of the flow of water)
Some people will say my method is a waste of time, or at least, it’s not as efficient as it could be, and there are some very knowledgeable people on this forum who have gone very far with just SRS apps like Anki instead of whatever I did to learn these words. (I have to say that I don’t know if they did anything while preparing the Anki cards, however, like creating mnemonics, or if they just picked a translation and threw the card into the app.) SRS is definitely very efficient in that regard, at least for revision. However, all I can say is that I’m satisfied with my results: I encountered 靡く exactly once, created the mnemonic in about thirty seconds – because I had an idea – and I’ve never studied it again with an external reference source. I still remember what it means. For 魘される, I took a longer time, but that’s because I wrote interconnected mnemonics for three words that night, all at one go, and as a result, I still remember all three of them – 魘される、唸る（うなる）and 促す（うながす）– despite revising them only once at most, and that’s including readings, kanji, meanings and etymology, albeit part of the etymology for one of them is something I made up for the mnemonic. I also generally come away with a decent understanding of how each word ought to be used, especially since I use monolingual definitions, but that’s something most of us will only do once we’re more advanced, and of course, I do still need to see actual usage trends to get a complete idea of how each word works.
At your level, what I’d say is… maybe use SRS if you have trouble getting things to stick? However, honestly, I think it’s more helpful to use a website like https://ejje.weblio.jp, type a new word into the search bar, and hit Enter: you’ll get lots of definitions in English, and tons of translated examples. Some of them will be things you can take apart using your grammatical knowledge. Some of them won’t. What you need to do is to look for what’s common to all the words and translations and to get a sense of what the word means in general. Try to summarise it. Then store that idea in your head, and put it into the SRS if you need to. Create mnemonics to go along with that if they help you. The point is not (in my opinion) to recall a translation correctly each time: it’s to try to bring back your overall understanding of the word every single time. Eventually, it’ll become so familiar, and your knowledge of the word will be so broad, that it doesn’t matter where you see it: as long as it’s a suitable context, you’ll be able to feel what it means. I also suggest that as you improve, you try to link new Japanese words to Japanese words you already know well, because that will
- strengthen your existing Japanese knowledge
- make Japanese more intuitive for you, because you’ll start noticing similarities simply because you need to find a way to use Japanese to learn more Japanese
One final remark on novels specifically: the advantage of novels, manga and other stories is that usually, certain words come back a lot, because they’re character speech tics or vocabulary that’s very important for a particular character or world element. As such, you’ll naturally have those words reinforced, so even if you forget them, you’ll see them again quite quickly, and eventually, you’ll remember them after several lookups. However, unless you’re ready to tackle extra Anki/other SRS reviews on top of what you do on WK, I’d suggest you pay attention to how you feel as you read: it’s alright to feel a little overwhelmed, but if you need to look up every other word and you can’t even tell what the overall structure of the sentence is, and this is true for 80% of the first 10 pages… you might want to try something else, unless you’re really motivated and have the time to study all that. Gradually increasing the difficulty of what you read or listen to is important if you’re studying it intensively and it doesn’t come with a translation. I rushed the first 21 lessons of my first textbook in three days (they were supposed to be done over 21 days), but they were very progressive and the sentences were extremely simple initially, with at most 5 very basic grammatical concepts (e.g. を is usually for direct objects) introduced per lesson, along with maybe 10 new words at most. Also, everything was translated. That’s the reason I suggested using free NHK courses as study material: the grammar should be fairly basic, and will give you time to get used to how Japanese works. Plus, everything is translated.
I hope this post wasn’t too long and didn’t sound like a fever dream (because I really do learn things this way), and that either way, you find a way to help you figure reading out. It is confusing at first, but it will get better once your brain gets used to how information is presented in Japanese. You’ll be much more comfortable afterwards. 
EDIT: Actually, what @dunlewy mentioned sounds a lot like something I would have liked to use as a beginner:
That’s a lot like what my first textbook provided, if I’m understanding correctly, and I really think it helped me progress so much faster than if I had learnt things the traditional way (vocabulary lists, long grammatical explanations going point by point, and passages I have to puzzle through on my own without a teacher).
