Most of the common lists come from Newspapers and books, there’s this one: http://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/corpus_center/bccwj/en/ the Balanced Corpus of Written Japanese.
But to put it in Perspective, your average native speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 - 35,000 words.
Interesting. Thanks!
Didn’t know that.
Wow that is a lot o.O
If you learn at a rate of 3000 words per year, it’ll take you at least 10 years to get close to native level fluency.
I think you mean at least six years to get close to native level…
Yeah, the good news is that native level isn’t the only acceptable level to be considered fluent 
At least, in my opinion.
I would say though, that the rate you learn at doesn’t stay static. Later on it becomes easier to just see words once and learn them. If you have 98% comprehension you can understand words in context. Like “I went outside to get the mail hoping for a check, but all I flurged was junk”
It’s also obviously not consistent, the first 5,000 are going to be used much more frequently than the next 5,000. But anyway, learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint. I still come up to works I don’t know with depressing regularity.
I meant 30000 words 
I flurged this to be a very interesting example.
At 30k words you’re way past getting close to native level fluency. If the average native speaker might have as little as 20k words in the vocabulary then you start getting pretty close at 18k. I don’t see how you arrive at “at least 10 years to get close” from the numbers provided.
The more important thing is that vocabulary is not a good measure of fluency, especially once above the 10K mark.
good luck!
I keep my bar of fluency pretty high (subjective matter overall). Therefore, I think it will take me at least 10 years of total study time to get fluent
Thank you!
Very true! Knowing vocabulary + when and how to use them are all important
Good luck from me aswell.
You gave my some very much appreciated advice here Looking for guidance - #9 by mrsaturn
And I just started with the N4 grammar and now I am curious what you were able to acomplish after finishing N3 studies?
Thank you!
After N3, you should know most of the grammar that comes up in everyday usage. I was somewhere around level 30 when I finished N3 grammar so I was able to do a decent amount of reading as well. IMO, Japanese has a really high learning curve. N5-maybe even N3 you can’t do too much. But after that things seem to get much simpler
Thanks for the answer!
So there is still quite a bit ahead of me 
Another thing I’m wondering about is how often you went over the grammar? I went over the N4 book twice now and I am still having trouble remembering some of the structures. If I encountered them I am pretty confident I’d be able to understand, but if I should make a sentence myself without looking it up, I wouldn’t be so sure.
A part of me just wants to carry on anyways, but maybe that wouldn’t be any good.
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