That’s another effect of the thing that actually controls this: rate of doing lessons. There is a time delay in the response and also a normal variation around the average obfuscating it, but you’re going to see every item a minimum of 9 times. Once for the lesson and 8 reviews. On average, your number of reviews per day is going to be 8-9x the rate you do the lessons. And your apprentice count should be around 3-4 times-ish the rate you do lessons. A really terrible accuracy rate would change that, but that’s a minor effect for most people.
Theory checks out
In the ballpark
Check
Check
Now, if you’re getting a huge variation, like some light days and some crushers, you can help with that by being very consistent in doing the same number of lessons every day. It’s ok to not do every lesson on the pile, keep it consistent. it’s much more important to do every review when it’s due.
In my experience, 20 lessons a day gives me a reasonable amount of reviews to do (100-150, but my burns are not here yet so that stream is missing). It does mean sometimes I don’t get to the radicals of the new lesson on the first day after I level up. That’s fine with me. I’m averaging 10-day levels.
I try to keep my apprentice items under 100, which means I end up doing 50 to 150 reviews a day depending where things are in the cycle.
Current lesson strategy:
10 vocab lessons per day as I work through each level.
5 kanji lessons per day when I get to them.
All the radicals, when I get to them.
My goal is to do 150 reviews each day
I do most of my reviews in the morning. To speed up the process I use the WaniKani Review Countdown Timer, and to keep a track of my streak I use the Wanikani Heatmap.
I haven’t done any wanikani reviews since quitting SRS around a year ago, but back when I was still on the grind I would always make sure to get my reviews down to zero at least once per day. At peak, when I was cranking through the last 20 levels or so at max speed, I typically had about 300 due per day, so limiting myself to a certain number would have led to them just snowballing out of control.
I do 100-150. I also cheat so I always get 100% accuracy so it’s nice and easy.
I’m only doing this because I put all of the common vocab words in my anki deck with sentences read by native speakers (from the sentence search site) which is more useful than just learning the vocab in isolation, out of context. Still going through each kanji and vocab 9 times in WK really helps though. By the time I’ve guru’d the vocab and made an anki card for them I’ve solidified them pretty well in my memory and know how to use them in a sentence.
I think my current level is taking around 10 days at this rate
My average seems to be about 150 per day, but today I did 300 and yesterday 80, so it varies somewhat. I try to finish all my reviews every day but sometimes I am too busy at school and work and too tired to do them in the evening.
I expect my daily reviews will increase now as I enter higher levels and start to get more complex kanji and vocabulary that I have not seen before, which will surely affect my accuracy.