フルーツバスケット (1)

It has stood the test of time incredibly well + good as a first manga

Furigana are present everywhere.

Fruits Basket is a story like no other, you think it's lighthearted at first and then it dives deep into generational trauma and radical kindness. The premise is really good and fun, and the first few volumes focus on introducing a diverse cast of characters, then it explores their relationships and their past, and it all comes to a very satisfying end.

It's great for language learning as it has so many different characters with diverse speech pattern and different ages and status. I would recommend to watch the newest anime as well, it has modernized a few parts of the series and it is really pretty, on top of following the manga really closely.

Language Learning

I think this Manga is a great resource for people early into their Japanese reading journey for two reasons:

• The vocabulary used is very common
• There's a nice variety of speech styles of levels of politeness mixed in without being too overwhelming (most of it is fairly casual)

I think the drawback (as with a lot of Manga) is that it's sometimes difficult to turn new vocab into sentence cards because of the lack of full sentences.

Entertainment

To be honest, I was slightly bored in the first half (volume 1). It was kind of light and entertaining but not much else. But, as I progressed into the second half (volume 2), I did begin to get a lot more invested. There were darker themes hinted at and it seemed a bit more mature than just light fluff. I am now somewhat interested to see where the story progresses over the next few volumes!