I would say I feel like I’m in the same boat.
I completely agree with many of the comments from others, too.
Something, that I think is worth mentioning as well, is finding an author you like, and reading a lot of their stuff.
Assuming I recognise the vocab, I think often the difficulty is getting used to the sentence patterns/structures. Sticking with a single author means you can really get used to the style of sentences they write, which I think can help clear the fog a lot.
I “finished” (added, not mastered) all the BunPro items a long time ago, I know somewhere around 14-15k words, and I still feel the fog pretty strongly. The worst is when I see something entirely out of context, such as opening a Japanese website and feeling completely lost, not able to quickly glance over everything and see my way around like I can in English. I think I haven’t done a huge amount of reading compared to other people at my vocab level, so I’m hoping there’s still a lot of gains to be easily made. I don’t help myself by tending to choose to read things that are a bit difficult for my level, too.
Its really just going to come down to grinding away and looking up (mostly) everything that you don’t understand. That feeling is totally natural, but I can assure you there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What it comes down to is what field is the book you’re reading related to? When you enter into a new field/genre you’re going to have to learn all of the common words and phrases that are typically used. But after you finish a couple pieces of media related to it then your reading speed will greatly increase. It’s always a tedious process. I recently started a novel about former empires and all of the historical and political vocab are really testing my patience. But over time you just kind of accept that it is what it is until you get used to the new material. Just remember while you’re trudging your way through it that you’re not alone in the struggle.
Nice thread, lots of useful advice! Summarizing the ideas of everyone here (out of order):
The stuff I would say were already said before by everyone. As by the thread you linked, I’m also going through the fog, hallo 
. For me, highlighting and hypersubvocalizing are new, and the breaking up of sentences, I really should be doing more… Well, let’s keep going, one day we may look back and notice we already didn’t have anymore fog for ages, and sit down to look at the sunrise
Also, for those on Android, it’s a good idea to check Jidoujisho, it fuses a bunch of stuff (including ttsu and yomitan) together, it’s pretty cool.
I usually compare it to static like when you’re listening to the radio and you can hear that there’s a station but you can’t entirely make out what’s being said - just a few words here and there. As you progress, it’s like a slight adjustment to the tuning knob on the radio and the signal starts to become clearer and clearer until finally you get it.
When I first started reading there was a lot of static and I had to look up just about everything that was being said. But as I continued to read more every day, I began to see a lot of progress. I love reading in Japanese.
Just want to add, and something to consider, is you’re comparing your current Japanese reading experience to your current native language reading experience. I would guess that you likely have a lot more years in your first/native language and probably only a few in Japanese. You probably encountered just as much fog years ago.
Just my opinion, but as we get older we tend to try and quantify and compare our abilities constantly. If we’re not “getting it” we start to get nervous. Yet, when we were children we often just “did stuff” without a lot of thought and strategy. You got handed a book about a cat in a hat and you just went with it. You didn’t spend the whole time reading it wondering if you understood a particular grammar point and how much vocabulary you needed to put into flashcards after; you just read about the cat in a hat.
You likely had the same issues you’re having now when you were learning your first language, but back then you just didn’t care as much and probably don’t remember it. So now, as an adult looking back, it seemed a lot easier than it really because you didn’t care about the struggles and didn’t bother to remember them.
You’re probably doing just fine. I think we probably all are. I think we just get bombarded by our own worries and a bunch of “I read every book by Nasume Souseki in under 3 hours and I just started learning Japanese two days ago! Everything you’re doing is wrong!” YouTube videos and forget that.
Thank you for posting this. “Fog” is such a good way to describe it.
Like you, I struggle with reading. I’m way behind you, in fact. I can read about a page before the compounding bits I don’t get grow too much and the fog becomes so impenetrable I can’t focus anymore and have to stop. I’m not used to this! I’m 42, and I have a PhD in the humanities. I’m used to understanding everything I read in seconds, unless it’s very technical and outside my field, in which case I have a really simple ‘way out’ without needing to feel stupid. Japanese makes me feel - no joke - very stupid and very illiterate.
And that’s exactly what it is! I have a vocabulary of around 40-50,000 English words, and a very large active vocabulary, mainly due to all my (over-)education. By my best estimate, in Japanese, I’m a fair bit behind you - I probably have a Japanese vocabulary of around 3000 words, if that, and they are all very, very general. As soon as I start reading something that deals with a specific topic, I notice that I start encountering the same words I don’t know over and over - which is how context, and reading, work. But I find it super exhausting in Japanese in particular trying to recognise the kanji, remember the reading, and also internalise the meaning - all while trying to internally relate it to the contextual clues that might help me remember it.
No advice, just recognition. I’m myself trying to get over the intermediate plateau/hump and I’m finding it very demoralising. Just liked the idea in the thread title.
It was your thread that finally pushed me to posting this one, actually! It resonated with the issues I’m currently facing with Japanese. One day we’ll have a clear landscape, not a foggy one!
You’re right that the drive to compare yourself with others creeps up, and the whole “optimization” focus of the online Japanese learning communities is often maddening. At the same time, the quantifiable aspects of learning are seemingly useful guidelines and goalposts, but I think being aware of one’s own shortcomings is incredibly hard. Sometimes, after so many hours of studying, I may feel a sense of entitlement–how can I not know this, I ought to, etc.–so when that happens I have to stop myself and remember that learning isn’t a mechanistic process. With Japanese though, I have to be even more deliberate in avoiding this thinking–because in practicality it is so different to the other languages I have learned to a more than functional degree, it takes a lot more humility in myself to accept my own suckiness. I’ve struggled with other languages, certainly, so I’m not unfamiliar with the fog, but the feeling of the Japanese fog is so much more confounding that others I’ve been exposed to! I am, however, hopeful: We’re, as you said, probably doing just fine 
I haven’t read long blocks of text yet. The longest is the “story thus far” on the manga inside cover.
I never stressed about understanding it cause I did read it already.
Reading your example I could see things popping out of the fog!
Seeing everyone’s advice makes me think I can try reading a light novel
Thanks so much for starting this thread! It’s reassuring to see other people describing the same feelings I’ve been having, and offering helpful suggestions.
In my own study, I think I struggle to hold a good balance between a high volume of exposure while not getting bogged down by overanalyzing everything, and taking the necessary time to really fight through the fog with challenging sentences. Both of these seem important, but I suspect I need to dial up the discipline a bit and spend more time consciously wrestling with things - as @josh did in his sentence breakdown.
I think lots of the time I don’t even take the time to identify which aspects of a sentence might be causing my confusion - instead just feeling frustrated and disappointed that “after all this time” (about 2.5 years of spare time study) I can still trip over things that look pretty basic.
Luckily there’s something about this language I can’t resist, so the journey continues even when I feel frustrated. And I love those moments when I see some clear evidence of progress.
Yeah I feel this all the time. Depending on the content it can feel like stepping into the fog all over again. For instance I recently started reading the Vampire Hunter D series of novels, and Hideyuki Kikuchi uses a lot of odd little metaphors, unusual kanji and formal grammar I hadn’t learned. So it was a huge effort to learn all that extra vocabulary. In some ways I like to think of it as a big Venn diagram. For every new type of media covering a different area I read or watch, a new circle is made, and slowly as I encounter more native content they’ll begin to merge with one another.
Reading summaries online definitely has helped me before, sometimes at the cost of having things spoiled a bit. If you know the basic structure of the story, you’ll be able to more easily pick up the thread of the story.
I also found that I had a bad habit of stopping mid sentence a lot if I saw a word which I didn’t understand, which I think ended up taking away from overall comprehension. In my experience it’s best to go smoothly over the paragraph/sentences that are troubling and take it in as a whole, even if you don’t understand specific words. Often this will elucidate the underlying structure more easily I’ve found. Then you can go back in with a finer look at specific vocabulary/grammar.
Over the past year I’ve read a handful of Japanese novels and many short stories and I do find that the ‘fog’ has been lifted greatly. I’m picturing scenes with greater clarity, and able to just read rather than struggle. But it’s a slow process for sure.
Try reading multiple works by the same author. Authors tend to use the same vocabulary with little variance between works, so once you read a couple and learn their words, you can read the rest of their works with ease. This will allow you to focus on sentence structure and scene processing. Again, authors tend to have the same literary writing style across works as well, so once you start getting use to the way they write, you can process their works quicker and more clearly. You can build up a lot of reading XP with more ease this way than trying to read works by different authors.
Some solid advice in this thread, here are my two cents for what it is worth, sorry if it is long!
Try and find more simpler texts (based off your bunpro progression you should be able to read N5/4 without any difficulty, N3 should be a bit of a challenge to you, N2 and N1 very complex). I recently found yomujp.com where they have divided texts into corresponding JLPT levels. Granted it is not in print format but dokushoclub.com is a blogsite where the author provides some solid links to level appropriate reading materials as well as book reviews so you can find level appropriate reading materials in physical form.
If you keep grinding bunpro grammar alongside reading to solidify it in your mind then the fog will lift for sure. if you know 2k kanji and 7k words then vocab isn’t the issue but grammar might be the culprit for the fog.
I would also probably check your decks and your input and output method for your vocab - at 7k words and near 2k kanji you shouldn’t have a problem with n1 level vocab and should be able to work out words from context even if they lack kanji. It just tells me you need to work on your grammar and maybe drill some onomatopoeic words.
I’d look up dialectal variations and build decks around it if you struggle to understand it. From experience, I haven’t encountered much dialectal variation when reading, more so gendered language, like in this text you’ve shared and I wonder if you are mixing them? Japanese fiction is rife with gendered language, so I would recommend doing some light research on it if you haven’t, it is very interesting!
Lastly, even if you are reading manga, books, magazines, the back of a food package, sponsored content, whatever, as long as you enjoy what you are reading then keep reading. Challenge yourself from time to time with more complex texts but don’t get bogged down in them either!
I love how you transcribed it to fogginess, that’s perfect.
I encounter that a lot as well but despite this I feel the reason for it happening is very clear to me and I just trust experience to solve it later on.
Japanese grammar can turn sentences long and complicated and most of all the sentence meaning often gets resolved only at the very end.
So even if you are familiar with all words and grammar you can easily get lost in the middle.
The key to be faster and more conscious is to divide the sentence (or maybe group of sentences) into blocks and know that if you get the block meaning by the particle or linking word, the rest is a filler.
Think of the blocks first, then the filling components that give its meaning, so you have to overlook the whole sentence first exactly as you would do unconsciously in your native language.
I am sure you have seen the texts tricks where you change all the letters in the middle of words but keep the first and last letters and the right amount of letters, your brain can just read the text perfectly fine despite it being all messed up. This is pure experience.
It just takes a ton of it to be extremely familiar with any pattern to be unconscious I imagine, so patience is key.
Any other language has this same difficulty, but I feel it is especially apparent with japanese grammar by its nature.
EDIT: I’ll add a random sentence taken off bunpro to illustrate my point (it is short so maybe not the best example…) :
ああいう風に、先輩に対してタメ口を使うのは良くないと思うよ。
The brain has to immediately identify ああいう風に, then 良くないと思うよ at the end, then catching what’s in the middle will be simplified and obvious, there is no trying to decipher that middle part anymore, its just the last piece of the puzzle.
If you read it in a linear fashion you lose that benefit in longer sentences.
I think this non-linear way helps a lot and while unconscious is actually natural for a native.
I’ll add one more thing for clarity …as my awful english probably triggered people’s fog 
What I referred to is generally not really a matter of literally ‘reading’ non-linearly but glancing over the sentence non-linearly to catch the essential.
Due to kanji this is way easier than any other language, even chinese as they pop-out immediately from the rest.
They are like an image container and are immediate once mastered unlike any word.
Also kanji makes the sentences much more compact, so you can often see a full sentence just barely moving your eyes.
As a comparison to show how helpful it is, I used to study German and experienced a similar fog.
This technique was impossible in German because the sentences are very long, no kanjis, and the verb (solving it all) comes at the very end.
So kanji is long to learn and master but a blessing eventually, when the brains sees a sentences it immediately catches a few drawings even vaguely as an introduction to its content.