Pretty much what’s in the title, what do you think is a manageable number? what would be too much? of course it varies between person to person, but have you ever gone too far and struggled to keep up with the reviews?
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Very much depends on your capacity to retain flashcards and how far you’re in Japanese studies in general. 100 Apprentice items is the recommended number usually, but that’s something you have to figure out through practice 
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Yes, unfortunately I noticed a pretty big drop in my accuracy after level 20-25 or so. I still aim for around 100 Apprentice items, but usually try to keep them below that number, in case I fail some Guru items and they go back to Apprentice level. Also, I’m switching gears to more vocab with Anki and reading.
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I’d say 15 lessons a day is a pretty active pace, 20 is fast, 10 is pretty easy to handle and 5 should be very easy.
For the first five months I was on WaniKani, I had no experience I wasn’t really keeping track of when and how many lessons I did. When things got difficult I started understanding that I needed to organize myself a bit. I did exactly 5 lessons a day for a while until I found out I could handle more. I moved up to 10 lessons a day after a while and then settled on 15 for the remainder of the time after that. When I got to the 40s, I started doing 20 on days when my upcoming review pile did not look too big to handle, because I wanted to get to level 60 within 2 years.
People recommend keeping apprentice under 100, which is good advice, but with 15 lessons a day, my apprentice count was usually 60 or 70 without trying. I only started taking the apprentice items into account when I was deciding whether to do 20 lessons or not.
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The usual recommendation is to keep Apprentice items to under 100.
Personally, I try to not go over 80, because I saw that I didn’t really like it when it went above that 
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Not really, but things got a bit mad around the end of my Wanikani journey, what with the fast levels and all. It wasn’t so much that I had huge numbers of Apprentice level items - at that point - but how many Guru items I got in a very short span of time. But, normally, the guru number is not all that important and can be ignored.
Personally, I’ve had between 90-170 items in apprentice with little problem to keep up. I tended to binge my lessons, so the number fluctuated a lot from the start of a level to the end of it.
But as you say, it all depends on how much time you’re able to devote daily to doing reviews. 
I think trial and error is really the only way to know what works for you.
I don’t think it makes sense to have a strict limit of 100 apprentice items. I’d only start worrying about the apprentice number IF I started to feel overwhelmed. 
But, it going over or under 100 during a level isn’t a big deal, imo. Constantly having a ridiculous big number of apprentice items (something like 200-300<) is when you have a problem!
The reason is that having that many in apprentice suggests that you have an abnormal amount of leeches - items that you fail again and again so they don’t reach guru and mastered and beyond. Stopping new lessons to actually learn the old items makes sense at that point.
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