I’m curious what I’ll be able to do when I finish both WK and BP (the things they have so far). So, to the people that have more or less finished them both, how do you fare with reading? What can you read? What can’t you read? How do you feel about your knowledge of Japanese in general?
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Will largely depend on the genre of stuff you’re reading. But, if we suppose you’re reading general stuff (Don’t ask me what counts as general), you’ll have 95%+ comprehension. You’ll still come across new words for a long time. (Context helps with those words tho many times)
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Though tempting, I think it’s not that easy to correlate to levels…
Learning vocab, kanji and grammar points are of course very useful, but what’s most likely to increase your ability to read is simply reading itself.
I started out reading books aimed at native speakers about two years ago, and at that time it was difficult for me to find material I could understand. Looking back at some of the things I was unable to read back then, I can see that they’re legible now.
While I certainly have been studying kanji, vocab and some additional grammar during that time, I don’t think these are what’s caused this change to happen.
You can technically know all the words and grammar points in a sentence and still fail to parse it since you also need experience decoding this in the context of a sentence aimed at a native speaker.
TLDR: basically, in order to improve your reading, start as soon as you can (WK, bunpro etc will certainly make that sooner!) and then make sure you keep reading 
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I’ve noticed that from my limited experience with reading and I fully agree. But I didn’t know how to phrase my question if I took that into account. Maybe I should’ve also asked how much actual reading (along with WK and BP) it takes to be able to read, for instance, modern (not light) novels? 'Cause that’s about the level I’m aiming for.
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I’m guessing the kanji knowledge can also help with guessing what a new word means? I think this is something else I’ve noticed from my limited reading experience.
I think this is also hard to answer, but just to describe my own experience, I started out with the No 6 series since that was the first one I tried that was doable. About a year and 1800 pages later I’d finished that one and noticed that a lot more things had become doable.
Among those were the e-book version of マリアビートル by Kotaro Isaka, which I bought and partly read, but then realized e-books make reading less interesting to me and abandoned it in favor of the 獣の奏者 series.
マリアビートル is a novel aimed at adults though, so I guess it should mean I had managed to clear the bar you described
Not sure how much this helps, but hopefully it gives you some kind of indication.
Also note that my bar for “being able to read” isn’t full comprehension, but at least being able to explain what’s generally happening in the story at any given point. If a few sentences are incomprehensible every now and then, so be it.
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This is definitely the case. It’s of course not 100%, but it’s a big help to be sure.
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