Dragon27 wrote:Constant corrections by parents and other grown-ups are greatly overstated. Kids learn the language more by imitating, rather than listening to explicit corrections.
Do you have children? If yes, how much time did you spend with them in their formative years?
At any rate, we are talking about vocabulary building for reading purposes. I don't know why do I need to use TickTock and PlayStation kids as a benchmark. Fiction and non-fiction books are usually written for educated adults, not for them. My Russian vocabulary is lights ahead of my vocabulary in all my L2 languages because I was a voracious reader as a kid, teenager, and student. And I expect the educated adults in my L2 had the same experience.
The OP wants to get to the comfortable level of reading of both fiction and non-fiction as quick as possible. That's why I suggested to add intensive sessions + vocabulary review. I know no other tricks to accelerate the pace and doubt they exist.
My personal experience tells me that it is certainly accelerates your progress. There are some objective factors behind it —
Zipf's law (see the graph there). Even if you read a lot, what you discover is that after a certain point words become evenly distributed in your texts. They are still important for your understanding but they occur only once or twice in a text (hapaxes). So you don't have enough repetitions to absorb them.
In fact, take any concordance for any book and you will see that of 7k lemmas which occur in it (the vocabulary size of an average novel) only about 2k — max 3k — will occur more that 10 times. The other
4-5k will be a long tail of words, the majority of which occur only once or twice in a texts. To makes thing worse, this long tail varies significantly from author to author (even in books of a single author!) so, unless you decide to concentrate your reading on a particular topic, extensive reading is of minimal help.
Have you ever noticed that Routledge frequency dictionaries are limited to 5k words? Why do you think is that? It's because after a certain point their occurrence plummets you get a long tail of words of equal rank and it's hard to decide which of them is more important.
At any rate, these are just my observations. I've noticed that people in language learning communities rarely discuss this topic assuming that extensive exposure will take care of itself. I think it's not the case and tried to provide some objective evidence.