I’m so envious! I took Japanese class in high school in the mid to late 1990’s, and only got myself to a point where I could start reading something like manga a few years ago. (I still don’t have the stamina for a light novel, although I occasionally work on it.)
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s good to encourage reading so early as, such as your situation, because you’ll have such a small vocabulary. But, I like to think, if you can tolerate vocabulary look-ups (made easier when our vocabulary sheet fills up), then anything that helps you learn grammar and internalize grammar earlier on will greatly help in your Japanese-learning journey. For example, you’ll be able to slowly recognize what’s going on in WaniKani’s example sentences, even if you don’t know all the words in them.
As someone who does this a lot (looking back on manga I’ve previously read), I highly recommend it.
My one word of warning is to not get your hopes up for compete ease initially. There may be some grammar you haven’t gotten down yet, and there will be words you’ve forgotten along the way.
But! There will be words and grammar you’ve learned that you didn’t know yet back on this initial read. You will see things that, by a few months from now, you’ll look back on and realize you know them now. Then you’ll read another book club pick (or perhaps an offshoot club for Takagi), and after that you may browse some random pages from volume 1 here, and you’ll find even more things that you recognize. The progress will be palpable.
Yes, there will still be parts you don’t recognize at a glance, even after months and months of reading. (Unless you’re able to learn grammar faster than a slowpoke like me!) But keep at reading and keep at learning, and finally the glorious day will arrive when you realize…there’s still thousands of vocabulary words left to learn =(
Thus concludes today’s motivational talk =D
I can definitely relate. My first manga, I was averaging four panels per day. Took me probably a little over six months to get through the volume. (Didn’t help that there was no furigana, so I was looking up all the kanji, and I was going it alone, so no book club guidance for learning grammar!)
Worst-case scenario on scheduling, you can skip a chapter here or there if you want to maximize how much you read “in real time” with the club (since it seems the chapters are self-contained stories).