vileru Wrote:

dizmox Wrote:To read like a native, unsurprisingly you need a vocabulary of a native, which language studies seem to indicate would be in the 20-30k region I think?

This may be helpful: The effects of vocabulary size on language comprehension. What is key is that, on average, 15,851 words give 97.8% reading comprehension. Furthermore, these 15,851 words are lemmas (i.e. dictionary form words), which means knowing the word families (word + inflected forms; e.g. sing, sang, sung, singer, singers, song, songs, etc.) for them would yield even higher comprehension.

Interesting, no wonder I've been able to understand a lot of Japanese, my vocab must be increasing. I can even follow news, with the addition of j-transcripts.
I was honestly thinking of expanding my vocab to 30,000 words(anki deck). And from there just add stuff slowly from text I don't get,etc,etc.

I was thinking of learning the remaining 13,000 common words on the jdic list, but I decided that time would be best spent on real japanese.

Now that I've figured out this how to watch Japanese tv online business I can go practice that all I please, but a lot of it still goes over my head. Hopefully once I can read a newspaper more confidently, the news on tv will be more comprehensible..hopefully. Right now I feel I'm just matching words here and there to the context on the screen but not really comprehending full sentences... kind of worrying if I'm hoping to take interviews in Japanese in five months, eep.