Thanks for publishing that. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I’m clearly not the only one to watch the whole two hours (!!). That’s a testament to our interest in hearing from people like yourself that have achieved a level of “comfortable literacy”. (GREAT phrase, by the way!)
When I first saw the thumbnail I thought you were wearing 着物と羽織！
You initially indicated you weren’t interested in discussion, but since you have engaged a bit in the later thread perhaps you’ll allow me to share some of my notes after watching. (Apologies for reviving an old thread.)
Is it fair to summarize your main themes as follows?
Even level 60 on WK is just the beginning of a journey (it was perhaps only 20% of your own journey so far). Further, there is no final point where you will have “made it” and mastered reading Japanese. The number of books you read isn’t the point: it’s how well you can read, how much effort it takes to read, and how well you comprehend that matters.
Building vocabulary is ultimately more difficult than learning grammar. Learn grammar basics first, then research and learn unfamiliar grammatical constructs as you come across them in your reading.
Build your vocabulary efficiently. Learn vocabulary for a particular genre, author, or even an individual book first. There’s value in learning, say, the most common ~2000 words that cross all genres first (including many words not taught on WK), but you expressly recommend against just throwing yourself at the “Core-10K” Anki deck.
Don’t despair, especially when comparing yourself to others! Everyone finds it difficult for many years. People only publish their accomplishments, the amount of effort it took to get there is usually invisible (and no different than your own struggles).
Your never-ending goal should be continuous improvements in becoming “comfortably literate,” but enjoy yourself! Read what you want to read. But if you don’t enjoy the process of learning to read, there is no point in making the journey.
I agree strongly with all of that, with three small caveats:
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I doubt that everyone on this forum even aspires to a near-native level of “comfortable literacy”. I suspect many just want to get to the point where they can enjoy a few simple manga, no matter how stumbling the process. Others (like myself) are more interested in conversation (spoken, email and text), and just see reading as a means to an end: The more you can read, the clearer the language becomes and the easier it becomes to use Japanese-only resources to research points of confusion.
I’m currently struggling to get through a book on Japanese carpentry tools but, to your point, it doesn’t matter because I’m thoroughly enjoying the process and I’m passionately interested in the content. I also know the next one will be at least a little easier. Ultimately, though, I don’t care if it never truly gets easy. That I’m already able to make progress at all is a reward in itself.
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Many, maybe even most, WK users do need to lower their expectations quite a bit, but there are at least a few that fully appreciate just how gargantuan the task of learning a language really is.
Forgive me, but “comfortable literacy across all genres” is admirable optimism but not practically achievable. The English equivalent would be one person “comfortable literate” reading Joyce, Chaucer, Gene Wolfe, and academic treatises in many unrelated domains. Any language has a lot more words than any one person can possibly know! Go where your interests take you, but as you point out, no-one should ever expect to stop learning new words (or forgetting old ones).
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Everyone has different interests, and content comes in many forms. Manga, light novels, visual novels, games, and even full novels aren’t for everyone. I can only speak for myself, but these days I’m far more interested in browsing Japanese websites and watching Japanese tv/videos and movies than I am in reading books in any language. Learning to read even the little I already know from WK has allowed me to understand (and research) much more of the content I consume (written or spoken).
I am fortunate enough to have discovered two genres of written content that does interest me, however: senryu and Japanese carpentry books. I mention it because the latter has already made several YouTube channels much easier to understand, and even things I’ve picked up from the poetry has paid off in everyday conversation!