Glad to hear from you and even happier to hear that the approach worked out for you! I think the problem is that most people don’t realise that grammar is mostly learnt implicitly and that there’s only so much you can do by studying it explicitly. The only way you can learn grammar implicitly is by understanding things you’re reading or listening to, thus being continuously exposed to grammar in context. If you don’t know lots of words, this will be very hard, or almost impossible, to achieve. Extensive reading and listening works better (both in the sense of it being more efficient and in the sense of it being more practical) the more you can understand, and that understanding relies mostly on vocabulary. If I were to add one piece of advice, it would be to expand your vocabulary by reading and listening, rather than by learning the words first and then using that to read and listen more.

I believe that this is not an issue of a foreign language learner. I feel most people in the US who are native English speakers find themselves drowning in unknown vocabulary from time to time. They have found strategies to avoid words they are unfamiliar with or do not understand.

It’s perfectly okay to comment on old posts! I wouldn’t have written this article in this way if I rewrote it today, but the general argument is still true, I think. I would say that quality and quality are related to passive and active vocabulary, but they are not the same. I think that having a large, passive vocabulary is often better than having a very small active vocabulary. However, it goes without saying that having a large passive vocabulary AND an active smaller vocabulary is better than either. I think the kind of imbalance that you mention comes from not ever really using the language. I’ve found that the most common words get used so often in conversations that they seldom need to be studied in addition to this. So, I would say that the main problem for students like those you mention is that they don’t use the language (at all?), not how they learn vocabulary in particular, although that’s certainly part of it!