"Comprehensible input" is what you hear these days from people in the immersion learning community. I was intrigued by this approach and the great outcome it promised.
So two years into my Korean learning journey, I put in the time and looked for content that appealed to me. At the time the most comprehensible material were webnovels. I got them on the Ridi app which comes with dictionary support from Naver. I went along and looked up almost every unknown word.
In the beginning my reading speed was painfully slow and I couldn't handle anything longer than a 30 minute session. But that quickly changed. After the first 20 or so hours I was able to read almost twice as quickly.
I tracked the time and the amount of pages read in a spreadsheet. I managed to read 30-50 pages per day, with a devoted time of around 45 minutes. Usually split with 30 mins in the morning and 15 mins sometime later that day.
When webnovels became easier, I moved on to YA fiction, a genre I generally enjoy reading. I soon diverged to japenese translated mystery novels, SciFi and short story collections, picking up vocabulary from a broad variety of fields. By the end of the 12 months I had aqcuired another 3000 words in my vocab knowledge. Thereby the amount of unknown words per book went down gradually.
In the end I was able to finish a book within just a week, only looking up a word every few pages. Context helped me infer the meaning of some words and the imagery of characters, interactions and scenes became a lot more vivid.
Reading also significantly improved my thinking and talking speed in the TL.
This is one of the most effective methods to make progress, especially when you're upper intermediate that is why I can only recommend it.
Congratulations on your achievement :D. I plan on doing the same thing for German, with reading as many short stories as possible. I hope that I'll get the same results as you :).
I don't know if you watch Kdramas, but if you watch on Netflix you could use the audiodescription to learn more descriptive language :) (I think it's better to do it with Dramas you've already watched, as the constant input can end up being too heavy)
That's a really good idea to become better at storytelling haha Ibet you will end up learning words like 웅성거리다 and the like but maybe also things for certain objects.
And good luck with your plans for German. I'm sure they're gonna turn out great :)
This was really well-written! I definitely want to do the same for Japanese but I'm a long way off (I have a bad habit of switching between learning different languages lol)
For Japanese definitely find a book or webtoon that has Furigana, so there won't be any holes in the text. And yes reading kind of requires a solid base vocab to begin with, but in that case graded readers might be for you! :) ファイト~