So I recently got the Akira box set!!! I absolutely adore Katsuhiro Otomo’s art style and I loved the film, so I’m super excited to see more of the characters and the plot, lore, etc. all fleshed out (≧◡≦)
Okay, back to the (super random) title. The problem is I’m a total beginner, especially when it comes to grammar, onomatopoeia, etc. I know the a few of the easy and common sentence patterns, but that’s about it. Kanji is less of a problem since I know Chinese already and I have wanikani as a great resource.
So how difficult is Akira? And how long will it take for me to reach the level required to understand most of it? I understand that this may be a pretty ambitious goal, haha. Any advice on how to start learning grammar in depth (preferably through online resources) will be much appreciated too.
In these cases I recommend checking out Natively, it ranks books based on user feedback. The levels given roughly correspond to N levels like so: 1-12 → N5, 13-19 → N4, 20-26 → N3, 27-33 → N2, 34-40 → N1, 40+ → N1+ Akira is on there with a difficulty of level 32, so quite hard, about higher N2 level (though the N levels rarely actually mean something, paying attention to the natively levels is more worthwhile).
I personally wouldn’t recommend starting with it, because you will be hitting your head against a wall for quite a bit of time before making any considerable progress, which can be disheartening. But of course, if you are motivated enough, go ahead, worst case, you temporarily drop it, until you get better at Japanese.
Pretty recently there was a thread made that should be exactly what you are looking for, it summarizes the early steps when it comes to reading your first Japanese book:
I think this part you can assess yourself. Does it have furigana? Are you able to read it at all and understand any of it?
There is a ton of resources out there and which one will work for you depends on your learning style. I recommend checking the /r/learningjapanese sticky post on Reddit since it’s quite comprehensive in terms of learning resources.
