This study investigated how L2 readers perceive the comprehensibility (operationally defined as “ease of understanding”) of L2 opinion texts based on readers’ profiles and text characteristics. One hundred Japanese learners of English as an L2 evaluated the comprehensibility of 16 versions of two English opinion essays adapted from Kobayashi and Rinnert (1996). All 16 versions were devised so that each one differed in degree of lexico-grammatical accuracy, coherence (sequences of ideas), and rhetorical organization (inductive vs deductive). In addition, we explored evaluators' background variables such as age of onset of L2 learning, L2 teaching experience, L2 use outside the classroom, and metacognition of their own L2 speech (e.g., self-evaluation of native-likeness). Following a series of regression analyses, the findings indicate that: (1) some participants were significantly stricter than L1 readers while others were more lenient; (2) lenient readers were found to have started learning the L2 earlier, used it outside the university longer, and communicated online more often than strict readers; and (3) disrupted sequences of ideas (structural errors) were a common factor affecting comprehensibility while lexico-grammatical errors affected strict readers more than lenient readers when combined with structural errors.