I was not speaking about blue words that might turn known during the reading but the number of yellow words that remain after having worked through the lesson. If 25% will remain Lingqs than I would not attempt to read this without a dictionary outside of Lingq. Imagine you are reading a 400 page novel. With 25% unknown words you are missing 100 pages of the story which of course would also influence your understanding of the other 300 pages, meaning in the end you would not understand anything.
Ramonek, when I began to read ‘Great expectations’ by Charles Dickens, there were 25 unknown words on the first page, but only 2-3 words on the hundredth page.
And it is the true for everyone and with all writers because every writer has his own vocabulary and repeats it from one page to another and because our brain is getting gradually accustomed to this vocabulary and guess it better and quicker.
But we don’t have to give up after the first pages which are always the most difficult.
aremia’JiJ’a
My vague definition of “read without a dictionary” is “read easily, with low concentration, and knowing 97-98%+ of words”. The 2-3% of unknown (yellow) words are ones that can either be inferred or are not crucial information to follow the story. I never refer to blue words when talking about unknown words because that % is largely irrelevant since half to most of those will either be words that I’ll know or proper nous that I’ll ignore.
Active vs Passive is only applicable when speaking or writing because “active” is something that can be produced without external references. Passive words are known we we see them and remember their meaning, and this means seeing them standalone and not in context. Requiring context to recognize a word is even lower knowledge than passive.
Regarding the 25% that you mentioned, are you referring to % of blue words before you start a lesson, or the % of yellow words after you finish a lesson? There is a huge difference there. Even 25% of blue words would be extremely high unless 75% of those words were proper nouns.
Yeah I think the fact that you know the story line already makes a huge difference. It also depends on the difficulty of the book but I’ve never read it and can’t comment. 8-10% sounds like kind of the sweet spot of being easy enough to read without concentrating too much, but also difficult enough to where you can still pick up a decent number of words. That’s kind of where I like to stay (these days) as well. Anything less than that feels too easy. Well it at least it sounds like you’ve reached a decent level to enjoy the language. That’s a huge step.
Yeah, definitely still struggle with stories that I don’t know, even if they are ~10% unknown words.
read through Howl’s moving castle, and I am still not sure what happened, it was so super confusing. And it was around 8 - 10 %.
A tip if you just want to read fiction books for language learning, is to read an English summary so you know what is happening before you start.
Again it doesn’t matter the percentage of words, it matters whether it’s comprehensible and you can infer as you say. 
It can also help to have an audiobook version and then read a long.
Aronald, from my perspective, it isn’t a good goal for an L2 learner wanting to “read easily, with little concentration, and know 97-98%+ of the words” any kind of adult fiction because
- there are very challenging texts (e.g. Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”, Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”, James Joyce, “Finnegan’s Wake”, etc.) where even native speakers have difficulties.
- there are older novels, especially from before the 20th century, with a lot of outdated vocabulary, where reading is also difficult.
So, it’s not realistic to be able to read such texts with little effort and concentration even as a native speaker!
Maybe a more realistic goal is to want to read more specific adult fiction more or less effortlessly, let’s say contemporary short stories, contemporary genres like “techno-thrillers,” or very specific authors you find interesting?