How am I to catch up? What am I doing wrong?

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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? :joy:

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Thank you! I feel relief already :joy: 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! :slight_smile:

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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:
image

@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 :partying_face:

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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! :blush: :+1:

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Both Tsurukame and Flaming Durtles should have this option. On Tsurukame, it’s under Settings->Review Order->Ascending SRS Stage

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What is your accuracy like in reviews?

A review accuracy consistently below 67% basically means you won’t make any forward progress, even if you stop all lessons. If you find that is the case, then it may make more sense to reset a few levels to find where you are comfortable.

I certainly admire your perseverance!

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Good luck
I had time off, you know life, and came back to >1,000 reviews, and just couldn’t get it down

A restart was required for me, I really wasn’t having fun. When you have that many, it’s hard to take your time and check it’s not a similar kanji, so the pile never improved

it’s been really good for me so far, but not obvs not for everyone.

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This is a good point. I won’t add new lessons until my percentage is at least in the mid 70s for 2 days. This helps keep my review queue doable. I also review twice a day

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Thanks all. Here we are at the end of today! I downloaded “Wanikani reorder Ultimate 2” and gave it a try. I still don’t quite understand how it works - I am likely your moms age :joy: so I’m still bumbling around with these scripts. But I already feel I have made some progress. Reviews are back to zero! I just have to really read and remember the screenshots and instructions. :nerd_face: I am going to ignore that it will be back up at 800 tomorrow lol.

A lot of people mentioned the lessons, which is funny because advice I had read months back was to get lessons out of the way asap. I think that really screwed me up. And recently I had started ignoring them, but I wasn’t getting many at a time. Seemed silly to ignore 2 or 3 lessons. But I’m not touching that for a long while.

Thanks everyone for your encouragement and advice!

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Getting all of the reviews done is good, but trying to cram all of the lessons at once can lead to trouble. That is what I also did at the outset, thinking it was what I was supposed to do. I only made it to Level 9 before freaking out and asking for help! :slight_smile: After following a more structured schedule, I made it to Level 20 before deciding to reset to level 10, and starting to use scripts - for studying, but not re-ordering. I let the system work as designed for lesson and review ordering.

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Not sure who told you this, but that’s definitely not recommendable imo. I heavily subscribe to the Apprentice limit method, where you only do lessons when the Apprentice level is below a certain value, like 100 or something.

I personally don’t really look at percentages, as something like that averages wildly depending on how many new or Enlightened items you currently have in there. Maybe an average over a few days could tell you more, but I personally just ignore it.

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How’s it going @Jcmst03?

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I was just finishing up my last reviews for today. The script really really really helps a lot. I haven’t seen A LOT of these older items in a long time. I don’t know why they’re all down in Apprentice, I am zipping through them! It’s fun again :grin: I’ll be back on track in no time.

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