In Chemistry in particular, and the natural sciences in general, I find that reading textbooks is a much more efficient way to digest knowledge than reading papers. The largest advantage which reading papers confers relative to reading textbooks is that textbooks rarely cover the newest of the new advances in any field. I rarely find that I need to read a paper to learn something that I can't find in a textbook-- this is probably because, in the natural sciences at the undergraduate level, people don't often need to find information which was discovered within the last five years. The major exception to this trend is people who specialize heavily within a particular field, such as PhD students, postdocs, professors, and the like.

There are other reasons why reading individual journal articles can be helpful, but since you asked this question from the perspective of someone hoping to continue their efforts at self-education, I would advise you to stick with textbooks, for the most part.

Also, reading meta-analyses of papers, which will themselves be published in journals, is often better (in terms of efficiency and knowledge gathering power) than reading individual studies.