You can search for topics in the WaniKani Community by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner. Try putting in search terms like ‘workload’ or ‘burnout’ or ‘drowning in reviews’.
From May 2013:
So, I hit level 10 several days ago and seem to have hit a wall of burnout. I was going at pretty good clip until now - always finishing up my reviews and lessons. Now, I just can’t seem to get my reviews below 200 let alone hit my lessons. As much as I love WaniKani, lately it seems to be monopolizing all of my ‘Japanese time’. Sorry, don’t mean for this to be a rant. I would love to get some insight or advice on how to get over this feeling of burning out and get some ideas of how to balance WaniKani with my other Japanese studies (keeping in mind family responsibilities, etc).
From July 2015:
You review your radicals correctly four times in a row and you unlock kanji (3.5 days). You review your kanji correctly four times in a row and you unlock vocabulary (4.5 days) and level up to Level 2. Reviewing something correctly four times promotes it to the Guru level and adds it to your progress bar. As the levels go on, you’ll quickly add hundreds of items to your review queue, and face a heavier and heavier workload.
From June 2018:
Here’s a graphic that is quite eye-opening when it comes to understanding the actual workload that Wanikani requires with time:
Note: If you’re the author of this image, please let me know.
This graphic assumes 100% accuracy and the y-axis represents not your daily workload, but the total number of items in various stages of learning (burned excluded). It’s not perfect, but it does a good job in conveying the reality that Wanikani is in my opinion
Wanikani works much like the snowball effect. At the start, it does not seem like much, but things will definitely start to pile up and that’s precisely why every beginner needs to understand how this system works.
From December 2020:
I know this is small potatoes compared to a lot of you but I am drowning in both lessons AND reviews today and I’m not sure what to do.
On the one hand I felt like I was on level 7 FOREVER and it sort of felt boring and was difficult to stay motivated. On the other hand earlier today I did 300+ reviews and I already have 100+ again and I have 70 lessons. What do people do in this situation? I love studying Kanji and I do my reviews morning and night. Is it normal to just develop a bit of a backlog and find it tricky to keep up? Am I hurting my learning by leaving those reviews until tomorrow or the next day? After a bit I start making more mistakes because I maybe get tired? Will I build up stamina? Am I just a weakling doomed to drown to death in Kanji? Appreciate ANY advice PLease.
And here’s something that I posted in March 2023:
Since every item has to go through 8 reviews, in the steady state the daily number of reviews will be 8 times the daily number of lessons.
If you learn 5 new items per day, then eventually you will face 40 reviews per day.
5 lessons per day → 40 reviews
10 lessons per day → 80 reviews
20 lessons per day → 160 reviews
50 lessons per day → 400 reviews
100 lessons per day → 800 reviews
So another way to approach this question is to ask yourself how many reviews you can handle on your worst…
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