I have been doing WaniKani everyday for about 5 months now and really enjoy seeing my progress in my reading ability. However, it seems to take up so much time and leave very little time for grammar and other general Japanese study. I’ve been trying to study grammar textbooks in addition to WaniKani. After finishing my year subscription, I’m thinking about taking a break from WaniKani to focus on getting through my grammar textbooks as well as other things that I feel I haven’t lately had time for. The thing I’m afraid of is forgetting all of the items I’ve learned. I’d like to continue using WaniKani again after finishing my other Japanese study. What are your suggestions? If I continue studying Japanese through other resources will I retain what I’ve learned through WaniKani?
What’s your lessons policy? Do you do them as soon as they’re available? A set number of lessons a day? How fast have you been leveling up?whats your accuracy?
If you’re going to take a break thats fine, but make it a break from lessons only. Still do your reviews or else you’ll be in for a bad time when you come back. After a little while of only doing reviews and no lessons, your workload on here will decrease quite a bit and you can use that extra time to do whatever it is you want.
I normally do lessons in increments of 20 to 30 a day when they show up. I usually level up at an average of every 10 days. And this is my accuracy.
I wouldn’t take a break exactly for the reason you’re worried about.
At the very least, continue doing your reviews. It’s also entirely possible to not take a break, but to reduce how many lessons you’re doing to, say, 5 a day (or 5 every other day). It’ll drastically decrease how many reviews you’ll have to do within a couple of weeks.
Thank you. One of the things I have concerns about is having personal time as well as time for recreation once starting college, as I expect that to take quite a bit of time. I really don’t want to cut back on my Japanese study, but am considering it. I will try out these suggestions!
As others have said, ideally, the best thing to do is to limit/stop lessons and keep up with reviews.
This isn’t so much advice, as just a bit of support: It is possible to come back from a complete shutdown. I have to go on full vacation mode periodically, for weeks at a time, simply because school and work and everything gets to be too much during school semesters. The important thing is to have a planned point to get back to reviews so that you don’t fall too far behind or forget too much. This semester, the book club has been invaluable as a less stressful way for me to stay in practice without being beholden to daily review. Last semester, I used the Tangoristo app for the same reason. In the summer, with school out of the way, I’m able to get back to my various SRS’s and get some grammar/vocab study back in. Basically, summer is like another semester of Japanese instead of my usual technical studies. 
Again, ideally, limiting lessons would hopefully be enough to keep daily review up, but I would suggest that, no matter what happens, you should definitely keep up some regular reading study to stay polished, reviews or no.
You can calculate how many lessons a day you should do here: Wanikani Statistics
Another method is to limit your apprentice items to, say, 25, and only do lessons if the amount of new items you’re learning doesn’t put you over your allotted 25 items.
What I did when I took a break was to stop doing lessons and kept doing my reviews. However in my case, I was aiming at getting 10 levels every three months, so the time I had left over from finish before three months was up was used to take a break. I usually had about 10-14 days where I stopped doing lessons. You could take a break like this, I guess.
I also have taken breaks by using vacation mode. However, I don’t recommend this. You get a little too used to not doing anything and don’t want to come back. If you do I wouldn’t do it for more than a couple days.
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