After I took a break last year between June and September because I started an apprenticeship, I continued with learning only to find myself being able to spend far less time on Wanikani.
After a few weeks, I ended up with about 1300 reviews piled up. At that point, the number of reviews I could handle and the amount of them appearing evened out.
Since then I have been trying to chip away at this mountain of reviews day after day.
Thankfully they are slowly decreasing, with me now being at this point:
I manage to get into the 700s after each review session with my last goal of always starting at under 900 being reached yesterday.
Now on towards getting in the 600s!
Yesss you can do it! ^^ I was in a similar situation after a 7 month break at level 23 – finally clearing those queues and being able to start lessons is such a great feeling, and it’s certainly doable! I’ll be rooting for you
I’ve been there too. I had a stack of over 1700 at one point.
The key is to just plough through without worrying about mistakes. After you finish a review session, then use the screen to review your mistakes and hopefully remember them for next time. 頑張ってください！
You don’t need to do them all at once. Although they only count if you do the reading and meaning in one session. Luckily you’ll never be more than 10 off.
Any reviews that you have done both parts of (i.e. reading and meaning for kanji and vocab) will count as completed if you stop your session or get disconnected.
You can use the ‘wrap up’ button (the little timer) to finish up your current session. There are also userscripts which allow you to do reviews one item at a time, so you would do reading and meaning back to back.
Late reply. Had to focus on other things and probably wouldn’t have been able to fight through the reviews anytime soon. So I just now decided to reset my account to get a fresh start and continuous journey through Wanikani.
Just came back from the 2000+ mark. I stopped for six months, probably a little more. Slowly chipped away starting earlier this year.
I’ve been treading water around the 700 mark for about a month, and yesterday I just spent my day chipping away and chipping away. 50 here, 100 there. I started around 9 AM and around 9 PM I hit the 200 mark…so I just went for it. Got to 0 (85 lessons though, nope, not touching those).
Woke up today with 330+ reviews and I fought them all day long throughout the day. Just got back to zero again, with over 500 coming tomorrow. I don’t ever want to be this buried again though. Maybe in a week or two I can start doing lessons again.
You’ll pull through and look back at this fondly. Someday. 
