I'm going to start using WaniKani again. I'm Level 6. My reviews swelled to 599 reviews. How do I clear my reviews?

WaniKani
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I started learning Japanese again. I recently finished my college education so I’m able to make time again to get fluent.

My biggest priority is grammar, so I’m using apps like Bunpro and have 3/10 of the N5 lessons studied. I’m going at a very slow pace, so it will be awhile until I learn all of the N5 grammar (I’m okay with this. The work flow I’m following for grammar is much better that I’m able to understand the grammar and how to use it). That said, I want to learn more vocabulary and kanji again after checking out a book called “マイマイとナイナイ”.

599 reviews is a lot though. I made some flash cards of WaniKani’s first 10 levels, but separated the meanings and readings into their own decks, rather than have them all in one deck. This will be a lot of cards to go through, so when clearing my reviews, how many of the reviews should I do per day until I clear my reviews and which levels should I focus on first? I don’t know if I’m asking the right questions, but at this point I don’t want to do a reset.

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Just do as many reviews as you are comfortable with each day.
doing more than that will just make it feel like a chore and will slow you down in the long run.

To control the number of reviews you get you can slow down on doing new lessons, say 5 per day at max, that should help keep the number of new reviews down.

also you might find the “wrap up” button in lessons helpful, it is the litle clock on the left, it will wrap up your reviews session by bringing in cards for items you have already partly done during your session.

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Just chip away at the reviews really at a pace that you’re comfortable with. I’ve charged through 500 reviews in a day before (and others have done somewhat more than that) but the problem is that you get reviews coming back at you in big blocks afterwards if you do.

It’s probably not worth resetting at level 6.

Also, not sure what you mean by making flash cards of the first ten levels. The point of WaniKani is so that you don’t have to manage your own flash cards for learning kanji.

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Sort by highest SRS level (or if your script/app doesn’t support that use level as an approximation) so you do older stuff you are more like to remember first. If you end up with a lot of apprentice items they can clog up the review pile and prevent you from rnging your way into overdue items at higher SRS levels.

As Rembrandt put it, don’t do much more than a typical number of reviews in a day. Doing more at once will lead to periodic spikes in your review count moving forward depending on your accuracy.

Many people here like the ~100 apprentice items metric for holding off on new lessons. So consider that a rough guideline for when to resume lessons.

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My understanding is WaniKani’s an online app, so I made my own flash cards to study in my own spare time when there is no internet available. I used to warm up with Anki before doing a WaniKani review.

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That sounds like a recipe for failure to me.

WaniKani is based on SRS which means that you need to leave the timing of reviews up to the system. If you ‘warm up’ first then you’re not letting the system adjust the review timings effectively. It’s better that it knows when you really couldn’t remember something so that it comes up more often for a while.

Just stop using the physical cards and spend that time on grammar and reading / watching, etc.

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if you don’t have internet, you can use on of the many mobile apps, several have offline modes. You can still do your lessons and reviews whenever you have time, at home, or away.

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Get the Ultimate Reorder script and start working your way through the review pile from the lowest levels up to your current one. That way you whittle the pile down by getting stuff you know pushed further out into the future.

Using flash cards to study before reviews is a gross misunderstanding of the SRS concept. You need to get things that are not in your longer term memory wrong, so they get more reviews in WK. Flashcards just keeps it fresh in short term memory.

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I know you want to learn a lot of vocab quickly, but don’t touch the new lessons until you start clearing out your review pile. If nearly 600 feels like a lot to you, add new lessons to the pile and your review count will feel so overwhelming until you decide you have no choice but to reset. But don’t do that because you can clear those reviews no problem, just believe in yourself!

Give yourself a manageable goal - say 5 in an hour or 20 in a day or something. Work through the reviews so you only answer the ones you know immediately. Refresh every time it takes you too long to answer. It might feel like you’re denying the inevitable, but if it’s been a while since the last time you did reviews, your memory might just jog after doing some of the other reviews.

Don’t feel discouraged about how many you don’t remember. Pat yourself on the back every time your number count is decreasing.

Once you’ve lifted your confidence and you feel like you can take on more, steadily increase the rate of reviews you want to clear per hour/day. Continue not to touch the new lessons until you start feeling like this is fun! (You’re looking forward to a break from other things so you can get through your reviews kind of fun.)

When you’re actually looking forward to reviews again, you can tackle the new lessons, but you should only work through the vocab of older levels first. If there are certain kanji items in your reviews that you’ve been skipping or getting wrong, these vocab items can help give context to those kanji items.

Once you feel like you’re definitely at a manageable review number, tackle some new kanji lessons too. Just remember that unless you’re burning items, the reviews you get done will eventually return to the pile. If they’re in the apprentice stage, they’ll come back faster than those in guru, enlightened, etc. Adjust how many new lessons you plan to do based on how many reviews you anticipate getting down the road so you don’t get overwhelmed again.

I came back after 8 months to around 1300 reviews. I followed the exact steps I listed here and got my reviews down to nearly 0 (save for a few level 10 kanji I absolutely had forgotten) in less than a week. The trick is not to force yourself to do too many reviews at a time but to do a little at a time until it becomes fun.

At least in my case anyway, it boosted my confidence to see how many items I still remembered (maybe not right away, and that’s fine!), so it turned into a game for me to see how many I could get done a day, and I did 400~600. Even if it doesn’t feel fun for you, you can still catch up if you just take it little by little. There’s no rush!

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There is only one thing you need to do with WK and that is doing reviews. You can easily clear them in a day. Get on with it.

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Break it down into an amount to do per hour for a few days until youre caught up. Some effort is better than no effort!
Id say maybe do 20-30 per hour as often as consistently as you can. You’ll probably find that you often do up to 50-100 when in the mood and you’ll have them cleared relatively quickly. For reference, the average user probably does about 200 over the course of a day, but if you aren’t learning new items the number will naturally decrease slowly as you learn them

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Ive been there, the trick is to just keep bashing your head against the brick wall of reviews until it crumbles. Just doing a manageable amount of reviews per day. Eventually you will get that number down to zero. Don’t worry, you won’t need to reset. The amount of them you actually remember will suprise you, and for the ones you don’t it wont take too long to get those back in your head.

Once you get them down to zero, id recommend to not just jump straight into lessons but instead just keep doing reviews as they pop up for a few weeks. Otherwise new reviews will come in like a flood every few days and it will be overwhelming.

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