“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves

Don't feel bad for disagreeing with me! I found your comments extremely interesting. Especially on the topic of language acquisition, there are people with deeply entrenched views, so I can understand your hesitation, but it's important for people to get a balanced view, I think.

It's hard to self-rate your fluency ;-) I find that I am very fluent in my normal every day life. Most people say that I speak normally and I really don't spend any extra effort to speak Japanese vs English. In fact, in many situations I find Japanese a lot easier. But, I lack proficiency (one of the beefs I have with CEFR is that it conflates fluency and proficiency, though it is arguably better than some other systems). I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pass JLPT N1, for instance. Sometimes there are things on the news that I don't understand. Reading books aimed at high school level and above has me reaching for my dictionary (although I use a Japanese-Japanese one now). That kind of thing. I think my biggest frustration is where I want to talk about science with someone and I just don't have the vocabulary.

I definitely optimised for fluency in my studies and my recommendations reflect that choice. I study vocabulary and grammar as I encounter it rather than from a list (though, like I said, the N3 and below lists are remarkably aligned with reality in my experience). Most of my effort is directed towards finding realistic language that I am likely to encounter and making sure I can understand/produce it.

Just due to life circumstances, I have the opportunity to chat with a lot of Japanese children of various ages. Studies show (in English at least, and I suspect Japanese is very similar) that children acquire about 1000 "word-families" a year. Which means that a 10 year old has a vocabulary of 10,000 words (plus all the related similar words, so police and policeman count as 1 word in English). JLPT N1 has a vocabulary list of about 10,000 words IIRC, so it is interesting to compare that proficiency with that of a real 10 year old child.

In my experience, the average 10 year old child lacks a very good portion (maybe 30%) of the vocabulary on the N1 list and does not understand any of the more complicated grammar (and can't produce any son kei keigo ;-) ). So if a 10 year old child has more than 10,000 words of vocabulary and only knows about 7,000 words on the N1 list, what are the 3,000 words that the average 10 year old knows that is not on the list? Also, a 10 year old is incredibly fluent in Japanese, but is missing quite a lot of the grammar in N1. If one wants to be as fluent in a language as a native speaker, will adding grammar help?

My personal experience has been that adding proficiency at the expense of fluency slows down the process. It's not necessarily bad, and if you like studying for proficiency you should not deviate from your path. As you mentioned, language acquisition is a long road. You have to do what motivates you because otherwise it is too easy to give up. But, having said that, I still feel that optimising for fluency will end up being the faster approach, on average.

My wife calls them "DGs" for dust gathers, although it would sound more zen if it was the Japanese equivalent.

Same problem here. I eventually started putting them in a "Read Later" bookmark folder. This fixed the original problem......