You might be able to cobble together a breakout from a few parts without building your own PCBs (though designing a breakout board for this is totally reasonable as your first PCB design project)

Something like this mPCIe extension set and a FFC breakout board (make sure to get the right pin pitch and pin count), or maybe just buy this one which uses a ribbon cables instead and then carefully cut, strip, and solder the wires from the ribbon cable.