I was up to level 23 but I had over 1,000 apprentice items which made learning fairly unrealistic especially with a full-time job since reviews will come in large chunks. Now that I am focused on keeping my apprentice number at or below 100, it seems to be manageable.
My question; now that progress seems to be slower, how did you progress given the 100 or less apprentice item mind-set?
It all depends on two things: how many times a day you do your reviews and how many new lessons a day you take.
If you only do reviews once a day or less, it will be very slow to remove the apprentice items from your queue.
If you do your reviews twice a day or more, they will disappear after 4 days, plus you are taking advantage of the SRS system ā reviewing a new item 4 hour after you learned it and then 8 hours later, will help a lot your retention, especially compared to waiting 24 hours before reviewing it.
Then the second thing is how many lessons a day. When I was doing 12 lessons a day I would level up in around 13 days, now I do only 6 lessons a day and level up every 20 days (but my review queue is smaller than before, which is what I want right now, so I spend less time on WK and more time on other things)
You can still progress at a pretty high pace! Iām not consciously doing that, but I nearly always have 100 apprentice items and I level up every 7-9 days.