rdearman wrote:I think reading, is brilliant, and I'm not advocating that you don't read, but I would say switch from fiction to non-fiction since the amount of uncommon words will be higher in non-fiction than fiction.
Actually, my experience (and statistical analysis) shows exactly the opposite. It is always fiction books originally written in L2 that bring me the largest amount of new words. This June, I went through 30-40 Assimil lessons, 101 Conversations in Simple Spanish and immediately dived intro reading Hawking in Spanish. The same month, I managed to read two of his books and end up reading a short book on AI originally written in Spanish (Chamanes y robots). No way I would be able to perform the same trick with fiction books.
This is where the comparision between native speakers and L2 doesn't work. When friends ask me for advice, I always tell them not to start with fiction because vocabulary wise it is the most challenging type of reading. (Well, may be books on botany or nature which have lots of detailed descriptions can be compared to fiction in terms of vocabulary density, but other than that, I doubt it)
Btw, generally I don't read that many fiction books and prefer non-fiction.