You just have to do them, basically. I had about 1700 reviews piled up from about a month of not doing any. I set a goal for myself to do 400 a day, in sets of 100. Took about a week (new ones piling in of course.)
So first of all, don’t do any new lessons unless you’re caught up on reviews. If you seem like you’re falling behind, do less lessons. To get rid of a pile, first change the settings from shuffle to lower levels first. This will front load the easier reviews. Then look at how many new reviews you’re getting per day, and choose a number higher than that. Maybe double. Then figure out how many sit down sessions you’ll need to do to finish that. Don’t bother doing 5 reviews here or there, you’ll never get the pile down. You need to schedule study sessions inside your daily schedule.
100 per sit down works for me, takes about an hour, and around that point I start to get real tired of looking at kanji make it a study session. No distractions. Your session(s) per day are a task that must be completed. The pile will go down.
But yea, the golden rule is to do the reviews every day. Because of that previous pile, I decided to never let it happen again. I’m on vacation overseas currently and doing my Japanese every day… no more piles for me. It was brutal.
I am currently working on a review pile for the 5th time that is 1000+. Hopefully it is the last one
Currently down to 500 with around 220 apprentice items. Not doing any lessons obviously is a must and really doing at least 100 (or 200 if you missed a day) and apprentice to around 200 to get it down in a few weeks/months will do the trick. I made the experience that at least half the vocabulary/kanji sticks coming back after a long break (more if you did spend time reading books/articles). Even more if you only account for knowing the reading or the meaning. And most often I am kind of close with the meaning or reading I get wrong. Do the reviews quickly and if you do not know an item within the first few seconds just input “o” or whatever to make it wrong and quickly look at the meaning/reading and get on with the review pile. Those words will stick eventually or become leeches you can work on when you managed to get your reviews to 0.
I only ever reset once about 5 levels from level ~40. It helps mentally but resetting everything does not make sense in my opinion as you will remember many words. I do like the success of bringing down big reviews piles though compared to resetting.
I was curious how your queue is going. Even if you have to take a day off every now and then, kicking a few items to the next SRS level will definitely lighten to the daily load of new reviews.
I got down to around 1000 then I ended up resetting again. I’m sure that I’ll regret it tomorrow, but it does take a lot of stress off. I’m learning Japanese for fun, so it’s okay if I work at a slower pace. Thank you again for all of your suggestions
Okay, so you’ve been through this before and you’re well acquainted with how WK works. So you just NEED to avoid getting yourself in trouble again, even it it means REALLY slowing down to keep your reviews in check with whatever you’ve got going on at any given time.
You’ve shown your tenacity by repeatedly picking yourself and getting back into it. I just hope you use that tenacity to keep your reviews in check to avoid any future stress! Good luck
I have no problem keeping up with reviews while I’m actively studying Japanese. I just end up getting distracted and leave studying for months at a time. I always switch between either studying Japanese, playing instruments, working on art projects, or playing video games. I tend to only do one activity for several months. Next time I take a break, I will try and remember to put it on vacation mode. Thank you for the encouragement.
Btw, I’m aware that there’s no logic in how I function I’ve just always hyper-focused on one activity at a time. I always have to start with reviewing, but I’m always moving forwards
I’ve been packing for and doing a move this month so my time to keep up on reviews the last two weeks has dropped more and more till this past week it has been zero. I can’t even manage to do reviews on breaks from the road because they are so draining to me that I just get exhausted and start to fall asleep which will kill my travel time on this drive, so just been staring in dread at the number climbing
Obviously once I arrive at my new place I’ll be digging into them, but it is so draining just seeing the massive pile and feeling like I’m not making any progress.
My speed through the levels has already ballooned my lessons, even with averaging around 30-50 a day, those massive dumps when you level and when you guru a set of kanji still out pace me. I’ve got pretty serious ADHD and mania, so it is full throttle progress for me or my brain just drops off.
So trying to figure how to balance catching up here, progressing again, and actually just taking a breather after this move process is really getting to me
Anki is a different SRS app, yes. “Anki mode” refers to an option to make WaniKani do what Anki does by default for items, which is that instead of having to type in the answer, you just get buttons to click for “I got that right” or “wrong”. This is a lot faster for doing reviews, especially on a mobile device, but you have to be honest with yourself when you’re clicking about whether you really did give the right answer (and not click “right” for e.g. “ko” when the answer is “kou” and similar near misses). WK proper doesn’t support doing this, so it’s only possible via a userscript or one of the mobile apps.
make it a study session. No distractions. Your session(s) per day are a task that must be completed. The pile will go down.
I’ve just always hyper-focused on one activity at a time. I always have to start with reviewing, but I’m always moving forwards 
