For me it was mostly that I had been going full steam up to level 20-25, and then I realized that suddenly I was getting overwhelmed with reviews. Maybe that’s the case here, rather than the items being difficult. With all those other leeches from other levels, it is harder to put all attention on the newer items.
To borrow an overused picture, this is your workload throughout the levels:
20/21 is exactly the point where you have your highest workload possible
Same here. I’m in level 22 from 2 weeks now because I spent a lot of time to assimilate level 21 vocabs. 
18 days ago I said… The 0/0 Streak Challenge
大丈夫。You probably saw some of those level 21 kanji over there though to tell you the truth, I haven’t burnt all level 21 radical/kanji/vocabs. Sorry for not being able to soothe you. Hiding away.
What helped for me was looking up the difference between duty and responsibility, because quite a few vocabs have that included inside themin lvl 21! From what I understand, duty is more about your life morals, like it is your duty to be a good human being, it is your duty to be good member of society, etc, but responsibility is more about smaller things in life, like it is your responsibility to do the laundry, it your responsibility to feed your kids/pets. Sorry if if that was hard to understand, I’m trying to understand it properly myself
This is only true if you answer every question correctly. The reality is that as you get a larger pool of items to play with, your accuracy will likely drop. My workload went sharply higher in the 40s, but by then it really matters less to pump through levels at the same rate.
Leaving accuracy aside, doesn’t the level of your highest workload depend on your speed?
If you’re going at two levels per month, your highest workload would be at level 12 (aka the highest workload is when your burns come back to haunt you)
I recently finished Level 21 as well. It is by far the most tedious level I’ve done so far.
I’m not so sure about that. I am doing two levels a month (11-12 days each) and level 12 was not that different in terms of workload. My accuracy (85-90%) is nowhere near what others are posting.
The highest workload (in terms of items in active SRS stages) is when youre starting to burn things (assuming your days/level stay the same and we’re ignoring accuracy for now). Since you’ve only been here for 5.5 months, you didn’t start burning things yet, so your highest workload has yet to come 
All kanji related to food are actually super important. They have low frequency because they don’t appear very often in books, textbooks or newspapers but they appear 100% of the time on menus, food labels and other stuff.
穴子 appears more often in my life than many JLPT 4/3 words that I 've learned.
I agree with you about level 21 being hideous. Level 21/22 are the levels that broke my motivations last time (work had a part in that too) and made me take a looong break away from WK.
I literally just leveled up from 21 to 22 and I have to agree that it took some doing. I’m not totally done with the vocab yet, but what really helped me out was writing out each of the kanji to get a better feel for their radicals and meanings when I learned them?
It made the learning process take a lot longer in the beginning, but I have a much more solid understanding going through the level.
Good luck my dude
Level 21 sucked for me too. My worst leech, 評論, comes from that level. Actually, I can’t even say with confidence right now whether it means argument or criticism since it feels like there were ten words that meant one or both of those things…
Thank goodness it’s not only me!
I’ve done it!!! YAHOOOOOOO!!! That was like losing the will to live.
For me, the level 22 was much more difficult than the 21.
Interesting. 21/22 were fine for me, but I stalled a bit for 25/26.
Also yea, take that workload graph with a grain of salt. That’s if you’re going full speed with consistent accuracy, my workload definitely did not peak around 20.
Oh cool, a thread about the level I’m currently on…
…and how horrible it is…
…yaaaay!
Thanks for the heads up about all those argumentative critical jukugo to come
I wholeheartedly agree! Level 21 and 22 feel like a big step up from the levels that we completed up until now. Even though my first burn reviews don’t start until later this week, I am already finding my enthusiasm waning for the first time since I started.
I definitely became team Slow and Steady when I hit the 20s. 40-50 days a level 
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who struggled with it. I have 70+ new items to learn, and for the first time in my wanikani career I’m scared to move forward because of how difficult it was for me to overcome the 21st. The worst thing is that it conincided with me getting a job in a comletely new field, so on top of studying Japanese for 2-3 hours daily, I also have to utilize my brain in professional capacity like I never did before.
