Hello,
I am a bit worried : as things gets more intense, I manage to increase my level but I don’t memorize well enough to push my guru items to higer rank. Some of the even go back to apprentice.
I am curently having around 150 aprentice and 500 guru.
Am I building a ticking bomb that will push me to a higher lavel than my actual skills ?
Thank you,
Pouet
The guru count sounds reasonable. I’m currently at 530, but I’ve had a guru count above 600 before.
That being said, the guru+ counts aren’t so important. What really makes a difference in workload is your apprentice count. Which in your case would be too high for me personally. I keep it below 120 most of the time. But that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself what works best for you.
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500 is about the maximum where I’d be comfortable at (and I’m pretty close to it as well right now). It’s not a bad idea to sometimes do a break from lessons for a week or two and instead work on leeches if they become too many.
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Ive consistenly had 1k without thinking much about it 
Was only looking at my apprentice count
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I will try to restrain myself on lesson as long as I didn’t resorb my apprentice + guru number.
Lets say the max total sum guru + apprentice to 500.
Do you feel like your reviews are getting to where they could be too overwhelming every day? If that’s the case, I would cap yourself at X number of lessons per day (say 10, 15, whatever) and see how your Apprentice and Guru counts are then. If that feels too high or low, then adjust your lesson numbers accordingly, and that’ll help you find your ideal WK pace.
Also remember that it can be good to invest a little more time upfront during your lessons to ensure that you have a higher rate of retention for those items during reviews. Leeches are inevitable, but spending more time on lessons can lessen their numbers, in my experience.
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For me at least Guruing a kanji means I am only slightly more likely to remember it than a brand new one. It’s mostly the vocab it unlocks that solidifies it.
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I look like this.
Going by my experience and seeing what seems to to burn out people around the forum, I think anything under 150 apprentice is fine. But if you’re sending some guru back to apprentice repeatedly, just take some time to go back over those items and strengthen up those leeches.
150/500 isn’t a bad workload, but I’d be somewhat concerned about this at only level 13. Also, its somewhat concerning if your master number gets too far below your guru number - it means things aren’t getting pushed up to Master at a high enough rate.
As other have said, focus extra hard on leeches. At level 50, it got so bad for me, I took like 3 months off from doing lessons and couldn’t get my guru count under 500 - one card up to master and another would get knocked down to guru. I never let things get about 150/600 when I took lessons and the workload always seemed reasonable. This was a VERY huge problem for me and it is something that will sneak up on you gradually if you are not careful.
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I’m currently level 9 half way to level 10 and these are my stats:
Is it a good relation between my stats and level? Thank you =)
I’m at 483 gurus now, but I did recently power through all the new radicals and sent them there, plus through a bunch of new vocab right before so I wouldn’t get bogged down when I leveled up (not knowing the new radicals were coming). Maybe that’s the case with you as well? I think once those radicals move on up (and I think they will easily) I’ll start to feel better.
But if I were you, I’d stop with lessons until I got my apprentice down to at least 100 if not lower.
My current count is
A: 77
G: 527
M: 498
E: 268
It makes sense to me that my guru count is so high because that’s when the real long-term memorization kicks in, and the fact that my Master and Enlightened is proportional makes sense too. I think the general flow of stuff like this is like an hourglass l><l, it starts big at the beginning (more guru) and tapers (less enlighten), then eventually everything gets through (less guru) to the other side (more enlighten).
I would not worry about your numbers of Guru items but I’d be scared with 170 apprentice levels. They generate too many reviews and with long reviews, one’s success ratio declines. If you are concerned, maybe halting new lessons and using the self-study quiz extension to focus on leeches at Apprentice 4 and Guru 1 items would help.
There are no Lessons 
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500 guru for 150 apprentice actually sounds low to me. If you keep your lesson-doing rate constant, the size of each SRS level should stay about the same, with some minor variation. That is, items should be going out of guru to master at about the same rate they’re coming in to guru from apprentice. But how many master and enlightened items do you have?
By proportion, your non-burned items should break down roughly like this:
That percent of the total number assumes you’re burning items already, but still, guru should be about 6x the apprentice number. This is what mine looks like:
I’m a little fat on the gurus just because that’s where the big wave of new radicals is now after i did them all at once, and apprentice is a little bigger, but that varies a lot and I just did a new set of mid-level lessons.
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How did you do this awesome chart?
I would say that 500 is actually a pretty standard number (between 400 and 600 seems to be the norm). Er… don’t look at my numbers right now 
I think other commenters are right that the Apprentice number is more ‘important’, but I would say that keeping an eye on your Guru count is worthwhile. After all, you’ll see all those puppies within a two-week span, which can add up to a significant daily contribution.
Critically, it takes a lot longer to sort out your Guru pile than your Apprentice pile, because of the much longer review intervals. Also, as you say in the OP, it can definitely be indicative of a high leech load, especially if the Master number is much lower (as Ish3rd mentioned), because that tends to be where they get ‘stuck’ I SAID DON’T LOOK AT MY NUMBERS!
But again, your actual numbers right now seem fine. Maybe try to lower your Apprentice count a bit.
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