Do you pile up your lessons as well?
I try to take it “easy” and do 10~20 lessons per day, but that is not enough to catch up with the ever growing number of lessons.
I’ve been getting to a new level with something like 50 lessons to catch up, but then a new level starts and another 50 pile ups from the previous level up.
Currently I have 160 lessons to work through.
I was wondering what people do with their lessons.
You can avoid this by doing lessons from earlier levels before lessons from later levels. Then you will (for example) finish the backlog of level 9 vocab before getting through all the level 10 kanji and unlocking level 11 ones.
This should happen automatically if you use the default lesson order, though I’m not how it works with the “interleave lessons” checkbox enabled. (That feature wasn’t around while I was still doing new lessons.)
Just because you leveled up doesn’t mean you have to jump on the new level right away. Always try to prioritize vocabulary from level you have already completed. If you end up with more than two levels in queue, you are doing new radicals / kanji too early.
Unless you specifically target going as fast as possible, there is no point in doing radicals or kanji while still having a heap of vocabulary from previous levels. You need to do the vocabulary ASAP after kanji to reinforce the kanji. That is the point of having here in the first place. Once you only have enough old vocabulary for few days of learning (about 20-50), than start with next level.
I think it’s more important to keep a consistent and manageable pace. I only do 5 lessons each day, and if my reviews start to get to a point where I avoid opening the app…I skip new lessons until it’s under control again.
Everyone is different but burnout on wanikani can happen easily as rushing lessons leads to hundreds of daily reviews later in big, uneven spikes.
I never used the forums here much until I was pretty far through WK already and I was surprised to find that not everyone did every single lesson the moment they became available like I did 
I never really spent too long on each review though, I kind of treated the system as more “passive” learning with WK. I just rushed the lessons to get everything into the queue and if I didn’t get something right I’d check the reading/meaning and hope I’d get it the next time. Often lead to review piles of like 300+ but since I forced myself to answer each one quickly it never took too long to get through them. My accuracy wasn’t great but it worked for me! Sounds like lots of folks on WK strive for 100% accuracy and will really take their time with reviews, which is totally fine as long as you limit the lessons to keep your piles manageable. Most important thing is not burning out and sticking with it regardless of your overall strategy.
Unfortunately just the way it is, if you’re trying to speed through. I will say, 160 lessons isn’t too much of a pile, that gives you around 8 days to finish at 20 lessons a day which is close to how long a level takes. Just divide your current lessons pile with predicted level up number of days remaining and you shouldn’t have any problems. If you get too big of a pile, just aim for a slightly longer level up, or bite the bullet and binge some lessons on the vocab with the most common sense readings.
