[missblit]

Totally agree with this.

When learning Japanese grinding vocab was extremely boring but did a fantastic job of bridging the gap between textbook literature and actually being able to read simpler (middle school level) native literature / comics / news stories.

And I didn't even need that many words to bridge that gap. Maybe like 1000 or so over what I'd already picked up from textbooks.

Now? There's no way in heck I'm going back to grinding vocab and instead slowly pick up new words by reading tons and tons of books.

I still need to rote memorize a bunch of kanji since picking them up naturally is pretty brutal, but like with vocabulary I'll only do it to the point where I can stumble through YA-level books without looking something up every other sentence.