For a year I basically always did a new lesson almost immediately once it become available and I reached level 22 in that time. But now I finally decided to take a break from lessons simply due to the fact that I had over 400 items combined in apprentice and guru, so the reviews were getting quite overwhelming even without taking new lessons.
Have you been in a point where you had to stop lessons and focus only on reviews because of how much you had in apprentice and guru?
Not me personally, but many use the ~100 apprentice items as a rule of tumb for when to ease off the lessons.
From what I can tell about your profile, you only have 23 items in apprentice, a really low number. You also only have 244 items in Guru. Again, a very low number.
I’d say it’s the Apprentice item number that’s important to keep an eye on. Guru much less so as the SRS-intervals are longer (1 week + 2 weeks), so guru numbers take time to change.
In any case, just try to follow the well-tried routine of having a set number of lessons per day that you do, rather than do all at once. There are plenty of threads discussing what that number should be, but I think you can just try stuff out until you hit a good spot.
Good luck with your studies!
how did it take you one year to be at level 22 and still doing lessons as soon as they were available? Shouldn’t you be way more higher?
I do this and almost 6 months later I am level 21. I dont even do lessons right away because I keep my apprentice below 100, sometimes I even have to wait 3 days without doing any lessons so I do more reviews and decrease apprentice items.
all the time nowadays!
i reduced from 20 - 25 to 12 per day but i often do less or none if i feel i won’t be bale to keep up with reviews. i really struggle to do any more than 130 reviews per day on average, esp during working week.
I didn’t always do reviews as soon as they become available. Sometimes when I have time, I could easily pass a level in a week by doing reviews almost as soon as they become available. But sometimes I was busy enough with other things that I might have had only time to have a one review session per day.
Or sometimes a level was just particularly difficult.
I generally have about 100 items in apprentice and 400-500 in guru and I do about 100-150 reviews per day. As far as lessons go, I do 10-15 a day and I’ve been leveling up every 2 weeks like clockwork. I don’t personally feel swamped but I do expect that I’ll need to slow down once my burns show up (next month).
That is the current situation, now that I’ve had a break from lessons. It used to be much higher, over 400 in apprentice and guru in total.
Worth noting that I also use Bunpro and Memrise and have things to review there as well.
Yes, there was a time (1-2 weeks) around level 18 or so when I felt overloaded, my weekly leveling schedule was completely out of whack and I decided to take a break for a couple of days, partially to focus on reviews and partially to see if my accuracy improves. It didn’t so I fixed my leveling schedule and continued with lessons and reviews per usual 
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Yep that’s totally normal. In fact i recommend you do so at some point even if you didn’t necessary struggle. Levels after 40 are fast levels so dealing with that + dealing with alot of leeches from previous levels is recipe for disaster (high chance of burnout). Not discouraging. Fast levels are much easier if you are prepared for it
Personally, I suspect people who have the time and the motivation to do new WK lessons consistently every day are rare - and are more likely to be overrepresented on this forum, haha.
I always do my reviews every day, but some days (sometimes weeks!) I pause lessons when I’m focusing on other parts of my Japanese language learning, or if I’m too busy with work. I’m going slowly compared to some others here, but it works for me! I’m certainly going a lot faster than if I did too much, burned out and quit 
Starting from around level 30 or so, I would stop lessons every 5th level to clear out my reviews. It worked until the fast levels where I had to slow down and just do them at a normal pace.
I am sorta doing that right now. I don’t know what it is about the vocab for level 21 but I keep failing some of them so I opted to reduce my lesson count per day from 20 to 10 to see if that helps me keep track of them. I don’t want to stop lessons if I can help it since it would ruin my daily schedule.
Yes (10 characters)
It depends on what is your limit. My limit seems to be 200 apprentice item at a time.
I have taken a break from lessons for several weeks now, and even gave myself a couple of weeks vacation mode and did no WK at all (life does happen outside WK, which is good). It’s given me a real sense of relief and control to get apprentice + guru right down, and I feel I’m more likely to remember these kanji long term. I’m not in any hurry to go back to lessons at present. I don’t have a cut off date for getting to 60, so I think this is going to work for me. I would recommend not going on vacation mode if you can help it, though, as my accuracy went right down for a few days, when I returned.
I didn’t do new lessons for a whole month because my review count spiked - wasn’t able to get the 100-150 reviews per day done - and my apprentice items didn’t get under 120 on days when I did 0 out my reviews.
It happens. It’s a little stressful because I want to push forward. But it is what it is.
Yes, especiallly with work, the biggest piles always come up at work. Like whyyyyyyy I got 10 minutes with my big fingers I do lots of typos which leads to more reviews.
I stop doing any lessons as long as there are 500+ items for review one week from now, as it gives managable 100 items per day to review.
I find it working better(for sanity, not speed) once you hit the wall and apprentice count start fluctating. I’ve been on this level for 60+ days, my apprentice count can be 60,can be 120, but oh boy I am glad I do not have 90 additional items from lessons in circulation.
Yes, absolutely. I follow the rule of trying to keep the number of apprentice items around 100 as others have mentioned here. With a recall rate of about 80% on average, this means there are multiple consecutive days where I don’t do any new lessons. I think it’s fine - now that I know enough kanji to start reading manga, and that reading shows how much grammar I don’t know, I’m slowing down on Wanikani and ramping up on other study.
