Thank you all for the responses! Basically, it seems that it just takes a lot of time to reach a high level in a language (especially Russian??) whether that’s through learning words with Anki or extensive reading. Based on the comments I do think I need to do more extensive reading while learning words at the same time. I think my approach going forward will be to read graded readers which I can actually read extensively, and continue learning words by my current method of LWT/Anki, and just understand that it’s going to take a while. I may cut back on learning inflected forms and just stick to lemmas. I still want to consider that. I feel like reviewing the inflected forms will help cement my knowledge of grammar. We’ll see.
LesRonces wrote:You can learn a language relatively quickly but one thing polyglots do is tolerate ambiguity.
I would agree with you about polyglots needing to accept ambiguity, but at my stage, based on this book, I don’t know 2/3 of the words, and I think that would be too much ambiguity. In the example you gave I’m sure you understood 98%-99% of the other context which allowed you to infer meaning. I think to learn words in that manner, you would have to know at least 98% of the surrounding context. A while back, I came across a presentation that provides examples of this:
https://www.slideshare.net/MarcosBenevides/how-easy-is-easy. He also references some research on this.
rdearman wrote:So let me ask you a question, do you need to know every single word in a Harry Potter book to speak English?
I don’t think that you necessarily need to know every word in a Harry Potter book to speak English per se, but for the level of Russian I would like to speak, which would still be well below my level in English, I think I would need to be able to understand all of the words in a fairly simple novel.
rdearman wrote:Also you might want to look into word frequency lists to learn.
My concern with frequency lists are that they are out of context. I originally thought about using them, but decided against it for that reason. I need a source of vocabulary in context, and a novel seemed like a good source.
Xmmm wrote:which is why a lot of people on this thread are telling you to drop Anki and read broadly
My only concern with dropping Anki is that, I know from my experience in the past that I have real trouble with producing the word if I just learn it through extensive reading. I completed the old Assimil Russian without Toil, and I noticed this problem. It seems the act of having to produce it from the English sparks it in your brain. I believe a lot of research into learning supports this recall approach. Anki just seemed like an efficient and simple way to do this. If I were just going for understanding, I think dropping Anki would make sense.
Again, Thank you all for the thoughtful responses. I'll try to figure out a way to add in more extensive reading with graded readers.
. Leaving out articles is a typical Russian mistake, we don't have such "strange", "unnecessary" things in our language 
