I can manage clearing 100 to 120 reviews in an hour. Going at it for several hours at time I still end up with the same mount of reviews I started with by the end of the day. It’s not doing much for my motivation here. I am only at level 16. What am I doing wrong?
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Are you still doing lessons? If you don’t do lessons, eventually the load will start to come down. Having that many active reviews probably means your lessons got a bit ahead of your ability to keep up at some point.
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Have a look at your apprentice and guru items. I suspect they might be a bit high at this point. Especially apprentice items will affect your immediate review load.
Have a look at wkstats.com to see how many items you have in the lowest apprentice categories, as even if you get to those today, they will come back once, twice, or even more often over the next 12 hours depending on if you answer correctly or not.
Using a script like [Userscript] WaniKani Dashboard SRS and Leech Breakdown can help you keep an eye on workload better.
I do see you’re on mobile, though. I think you need to be on a desktop/laptop to install and use the script.
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I actually gasped when I saw this.
First of all stop doing lessons.
When I had this, I stopped doing lessons, and just started doing at most 100 reviews a day. It seems ineffective, but after a while the amount of added review items stops, and most importantly, you will suddenly start taking time and learning from your mistakes.
That last tool is the most important way to getting all your items away from Apprentice, and spread out over a longer period of time instead of the next two days. If you just keep doing 600 reviews a day, then you’ll learn nothing and all those items will stay in Apprentice forever.
Once everything is calmed down, you’re going to want to define a maximum for your Apprentice. If you have for example more than 100 Apprentice don’t do lessons. Once it dips below that, you can do more lessons until your apprentice is 100 again.
EDIT: Yeah, I see you have basically 1000 Apprentice items right now. Did you just not do vocab and then do everything at the same time?
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Are you using a reorder script during lessons? Or more specifically, are you shooting ahead with your kanji lessons? I’ve had that problem before.
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Slightly off topic, but how do you see how many apprentice items someone else has?
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https://www.wanikani.com/users/<insert username here!>
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I don’t really use scripts so I just do what comes. I downloaded the reorder one today. I generally just do enough lessons to open up all the kanji for a level.
“If you just keep doing 600 reviews a day, then you’ll learn nothing and all those items will stay in Apprentice forever.” EXACTLY! I feel like it’s such an overwhelming amount I am never going to make any real progress.
Thanks so much for the practical advice!
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I just downloaded the reorder script today. I haven’t been using anything really.
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Just accept that your reviews are going to be high for a while for now, and that you won’t be able to do any lessons for a while.
I actually recommend using a reorder script for this situation, and sorting your reviews so that the lowest Apprentice items will come first. By doing that, you’ll get your hardest review items in a quicker succession, which increases the chance of them sticking in your brain significantly.
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How is it even possible to get to this point? 
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Thank you! I feel relief already I was just spinning my wheels. I’m not worried about a timeline, this is just for fun. So when it started to get so stressful it was really discouraging! Yaaaay! Light at the end of the tunnel!
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If you are like me and have very little self-control when it comes to lessons, you can use a script like the lesson cap script to make sure you won’t end up in this situation again.
Good luck. You can do it! 
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One problem with trying to catch up with such a high Apprentice count is that all the items that drop to Apprentice 3 and lower would need be reviewed again by the next day, which might not happen due to WaniKani randomizing reviews. This means that your pile of reviews will result in at least double or triple the amount of actual reviews.
When I was in a similar situation, albeit with a lot less items in the queue, I installed [Userscript] Reorder Buttons to make sure that even if I didn’t review all available items at once, I would at least review those that needed it the most.
After all, for a Guru II or Master item it doesn’t really matter if it is delayed by a few days, but an item in Apprentice II will almost certainly fail if it isn’t reviewed in the expected time frame.
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If I may propose a strategy for this: you say you can go through about 100 review items in an hour. So let’s use that as a baseline. Now let’s reorder. Set to ‘lowest srs first’, so you get your apprentice 1 items first. (How many do you have in that category right now?) Let’s also set it to ‘lowest level first’, so it’s also ordered on that aspect.
Judging by your screenshot, you’re in the UK, right? At least it’s almost 2pm.
14:00 - do 100 reviews. You’ll get some right (back in queue by 22:00), you’ll get some wrong (back in queue by 18:00).
18:00 - do 100 reviews. Make sure to use the same settings, to see the items you missed before, plus a bunch of new ones. You’ll get some right (back in queue by 02:00, don’t force yourself to stay awake to hit this review), you’ll get some wrong (back in queue by 22:00).
22:00 - do 100 reviews. Depending on how many apprentice 1 items you had starting off, you might even see those ones you got right at 14:00 again!
Depending on how much time you have this afternoon, you might be able to start another cycle like this from 15:00, 16:00, meaning you’ll have done up to 300 of your apprentice reviews. And be able to catch your mistakes before midnight as well.
Ordering by lowest level first, makes sure you get your mistakes back as soon as they’re back in queue, making sure you get another chance to get those up the ladder.
But make sure to eat, drink and sleep as well!
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That’s some amazing advice!
And here i was panicking because i let my apprentice go to this:
@Jcmst03 let us know how you progress through. It would be nice to see your apprentice pile go down to 100 - 150 before you resume lessons.
You could post a screenshot here everyday or twice a day to keep motivated. We’ll be cheering 
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Definitely! Post every day to show your progress!
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This is the way.
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If it’s already starting to become too much time per day to handle on an ongoing basis, then I would suggest immediately slowing right down. Only do as many reviews per day as you can manage for days, weeks, and months at a time. Otherwise, you will start to get more and more overwhelmed, which is absolutely no fun.
Stop doing new lessons until you get your reviews down to a sustainable number of reviews per day (or, per week if that gives you a better sense of your upcoming review load).
Only do reviews for a while. Don’t worry right now about getting your reviews down to zero. What you want to do right now is spread out the review backlog you currently have, and the way to do this is to just do X number of reviews per day, where X is that sustainable number you can reasonably handle for the long term.
Eventually, after doing X per day, your review queue will whittle down to 0. Then you can consider adding new lessons again, just a few at a time. Keep doing X reviews per day, and if you start getting a backlog again, then just slow down or stop doing new lessons.
Originally, I started WK by following the advice about how to do levels as fast as possible. That was working well until I started to get to around your current level. Then I found myself spending a ton of my time on WK and neglecting other important stuff in life. I realized I couldn’t really maintain the ‘fastest leveling up’ strategy that I had started with – but actually I’m okay with that since I’m in this to learn Japanese, not to finish level 60 in the minimum time possible.
Of course, you may have different goals. The above advice is only based on my own experience and strategy for dealing with overload and weakening motivation. Good luck! Just keep plugging away steadily and you will be fine in a week or two or so. Cheers! 
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