I’ll admit I wasn’t keeping my lessons at 0 anymore once I hit level 6, and I had about 50-60 outstanding when I hit level 7. But I had 0 pending reviews when I went to bed last night: if it’s already piling up this much how many reviews would I have had if I were keeping up with my lessons?
You can treat this as a general ‘what is my life now’ thread for people in the level 6-10 range… Any advice for managing the new workload is appreciated.
The most solid recommendation I’ve seen is to keep your “apprentice” count at about 100. By that measure, it doesn’t matter how many lessons you have piled up. You just wait until your apprentice dips below 100, then do some more lessons.
From there, tailor to your needs, such as aiming for a higher or lower apprentice count depending on how many reviews you can handle per day.
I have an apprentice count of 0 and a guru count of 3
That’s expected for a free account in the first three lessons. Having cleared level 3 and without subscribing, you’ll have your apprentice reduce to zero over time (as you have), and then you guru will reduce to zero over time.
If you decide to subscribe to WaniKani, I’d recommend slowly easing toward having 100 apprentice, such as doing only five lessons a day. It can be more or fewer, depending on what you can reasonably learn on a daily basis, but I’d recommend starting slow for the first week or two of level four as the daily reviews will start to build up.
The one additional suggestion I’d add to “keep apprentice count under 100” is to try to do lessons in bite-size chunks; 5-20 at a time for starters. You can go higher, but use caution, because doing a ton of lessons at once can reduce your ability to recall them correctly at the first review 4 hours later – and splitting them up also helps avoid the “get hit with 100 reviews all at once” problem.
I don’t have any advice because I’m also level 7 and this just happened to me too. So, just wanted to say I’m right here with you and we will get through it!
At every level up I usually have 100+ outstanding lessons including new kanji / radicals. A great deal of these are unlearned vocab from the previous level (I guess I slack off a little bit – but it’s fine). The way to get through lots of lessons like that is to just do them at whatever pace you like (I limit myself to 20 lessons per day). I find I don’t really care about getting 0 lessons anymore, as IMO it’s an unhelpful goal unless you struggle to be motivated to learn things without the gamification.
About reviews… after level 10 I pretty much had 100+ reviews per day. (That dark green colour that dominates means 100-200 reviews for that day). I level up roughly every 2-3 weeks.
Back when I began I think I found these kind of intimidating, but I’ve gotten used to it as either way I can usually get through them in like 20-30 minutes (note I do two review sessions, both going to 0 reviews, per day, and my review items are bulked up around the general times of those sessions).
So as you can see stuff can increase a lot as you raise to higher levels. But don’t be scared! So long as you keep your head, it’ll be fine. That’s the main thing with SRS, I think. The one thing to do is just keep going.
I think I haven’t seen 0 lessons from level 8 or even longer, and I don’t have any problems because of that. But everyday I do all reviews, so I see “0 reviews” at least once in a day.
I have to say, that constant movement with stable everyday speed (for instance 10 new lessons per day) gives you very predictable workload with reviews, very solid progress, there will be no tsunamies. You can easily get used to it and find time in your daily schedule. If you find that there are more reviews than you can manage everyday, than just slow down your amount of new lessons, and after several days, your review workload will go down too.
Trying to learn all 100 lessons as fast as possible (worst - in one day) will cause waves in your schedule. One day you will have 50 review, on next day - 150, then 50 again, and then wooops, several waves sum together, and you have 500 reviews. Here it is - small tsunami, that could break you habbit, you skip reviews for 2-3 days and you will get big tsunami in 1000 reviews. Then reset few levels because this can’t be handled. Wasted time.
if it starts to get overwhelming, stop your lessons and do reviews in chunks the size you’d like to see. if you do, say, 50 every 8 hours, then that’s what they’ll spread out to, and once they drop lower, slowly restart your lessons.
Seconding the “keep your apprentice queue around 100 items” advice.
Only 104 reviews in the morning? I look forward to that again.
Keeping apprentice queue low is effective, though if you are trying to go quickly then it might not always be an option. Other than that it is all about planning, knowing what is coming by the Ultimate Timeline script will help with this immensely. Get familiar with apprentice items timing (4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days) will also allow you to plan busy days for when you have time.
If speed isn’t something you care about and reviews are starting to become a problem, then just take a couple of weeks off from lessons. You would be amazed just how quickly incoming review counts start to drop, I haven’t done any lessons in about a week and I barely have any reviews coming until Thursday (when I have 180 in 4 hours).
*lessons. i know that’s what you meant 
i can delete once you edit
Thanks for that. I was sure I had already fixed that before submitting, must have gotten distracted and forgot
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