I had to take a 2 month break dur to work getting too crazy and not having time. I had been chugging away for about 6 months. Now im trying to go bavk and have 1000 reviews. Whats the best strategy for getting back into the swing of things? Im at level 13.
TiA
Best is subjective, this is just my suggestion.
First off, no new lessons. Decide how long you want to spend on reviews each day, set a timer and do reviews until it beeps. Then use the wrap up button to finish up the ones youâre partway through.
Other options include:
Having a set number of reviews to do. Want to do 100 a day? Hit wrap up at 90.
Instead of one long session to get through some each day, lots of little 10 reviews sessions where you use wrap up at the very start.
If doing no new lessons is really demotivating for you, you could choose to do a few (like 1-3) after a successful review session. This will make it take longer to get through the reviews pile.
WellâŠ
First and foremost: DO NOT reset your level, no matter how difficult the reviews might be at the moment.
(just in case you were thinking about this 
)
Like @RebBlue said, decide whatâs a comfortable review amount for you (either time or quantity) and just trudge along, while taking fewer lessons until the pile goes down considerably.
If doing reviews on a PC: Are you open to installing userscripts?
Iâd suggest Back-to-back - it could be good to speed up the review sessions and just make them a little more pleasant 
If reviewing on mobile via Smouldering Durtles or some other app, there should be an option for getting reviews in meaning+reading pairs.
I was in the same position, also level 13 and when I came back I had >1500 items to review.
I did exactly what was suggested already. No new lessons until i went through all of them. Tried to do 100 in the morning and another 100 at night. Took me about two weeks to hit 0 for the first time, then started to do daily lessons again.
I canât find it, but in another thread giving advice for this, a lot of people also advise going to your WK settings (screenshots two posts down) and making it so that it shows reviews from the earliest levels first. Iâve tried that myself (here and on Anki) and the difference is night and day. (in addition to the other suggestions people make here, i.e., stopping lessons and spreading out review sessions).
Those early levels are the reviews you are most likely to get correct, and when you do, they get moved into the longest review intervals (getting them out of the way for the duration of your catchup). And even if you miss them, then they will come back around for review and get prioritised, so you will see them early enough to remember, and they will naturally move out to guru. So it clears the pile way faster.
Whereas when you have the default random reviews from all levels, and you get to level 12/13 items (your most recently learned ones), youâre more likely to miss them. Yet, after missing them, even on a short review period, they are competing with all the other cards to get reviewed, so you miss the super short intervals, and by the time you see them in a few days, you forgot, miss them again and the pile doesnât go down as fast.
This âearliest level first reordingâ is a good strategy for catching up, or for pausing lessons and dealing with leeches if you get overwhelmed with leeches later. Then when youâre done, switch back to random ordering reviews, as that is better in the long run when you are keeping up with reviews.
Um, I think thatâs only an option in the third-party Android/iOS apps, not a core feature for âvanillaâ WK.
I believe there is/was a reorder userscript that could accomplish this, but donât know if itâs still usableâŠ
No this is totally vanilla, here are some screenshots. Go to your icon / click on âAccountâ / then get into the âAppâ tab / Go to the âReview orderingâ section / select âLower Levels Firstâ
If you donât want to do it all at once, Iâm pretty sure (I havenât tested this but I think it should work) that you can abuse vacation mode to make sure you donât get any new reviews - turning it off at the beginning of each session and on after each session.
Youâd still have the reviews to do but itâd probably be more seamless with what your original schedule was.
Aaaah thanks for that!
Now that youâve pointed it out, I recalled that in fact I did see that setting a long time ago. Just that I was looking for the opposite - show me âfreshâ items first -, it couldnât do that so I simply moved on and forgot about it 
I donât use any reorder script, mine are all shuffled.
Iâd have liked newer items first because theyâre often easier for me⊠Iâm more likely to fail something thatâs in a very late stage and Iâve not seen in a long time. And if Iâd start off a review session with multiple failures due to that built-in âlower levels firstâ option, itâd demoralize me and result in artificially lower accuracy.
Unless, of course (and Iâve only just realized this now) I misinterpreted the option. Now Iâm wondering if by âlower levelsâ they mean lower SRS levels, whereas I took it as âlower WK levelsâ 
Gotta check it out tomorrow at the next review session
I think it is lower WK levelsâŠ
And while it is slightly demoralizing to start with a couple of the leeches I get wrong all the time, it nice to see the accuracy level go up when review progress rather than down. Or, at least for me that is the case 
I was thinkng aloso i should review alll my burned items
Btw, why is resetting generally considered a bad thing? Is it because it slows down your progression?
Iâve reset a time or two. It does slow you down, but sometimes thatâs a good thing. Especially if you have lifetime and arenât in a hurry.
Pretty much this, yes. Especially when one is still in the lower levels.
Not that there wouldnât be good reasons to reset (when one truly has a poor grasp of the kanji and vocab, or is coming back to Japanese after a really long hiatus) but I honestly donât think itâs warranted only to clear a pile of reviews after a (relatively) short break.
Out of those 1000 reviews mentioned, chances are the OP will clear a big chunk in a few daysâ time or even a few weeks if going slow, which is still far less time than itâd take to start from scratch and get back to L13.
Yeah, I reset to level 1 once or twice and regret it. I never took a long enough break to warrant a full reset, and Iâve been through the first few levels so many times. This also isnât my first WK account. I first joined in 2019 or 2020, although Iâd never make it past the free levels. Bunpro says I joined in June 2020, and Iâm sure I started WK before then.
True. I only bought my lifetime during the last sale in December. I do plan on speeding up soon, donât wanna stay in these early levels for too long. Also, youâd think Iâd be a lot higher level since I currently have a review streak of 224 (did a full reset before my first streak), but I just havenât been doing lessons very often for a while.
