Occasionally I’ll spend a moment longer than normal when I’m sure I know an item but just can’t seem to recall it. I do my reviews with my morning coffee, so I often pause for a sip or two. I’ve learned that if it takes me more time than that, then I don’t really know it yet. It’s best to just give up, knowing I’ll get more reviews.
You’re still early in your journey, so you don’t yet have many reviews each day. Soon enough you’ll find yourself doing 100 or more reviews every day if you stick with it (assuming a normal pace with lessons). Once you have a big pile of reviews every day it becomes easier to just move on quickly with an individual item instead of racking your brain for the correct answer.
For what it’s worth, my review sessions go like this (with a fresh cup of coffee):
Before actually starting the review, I spend ten minutes or so reviewing any kanji or radicals that are still in the Apprentice 1 stage (I use the wonderful Wanikani Item inspector userscript for this).
I like to get my review queue down to zero at least once every day. I find it uncomfortable to do so if I have many more than 150 or so items in my queue, so I do my lessons accordingly (rarely getting the lesson queue down to zero).
I don’t like spending more than an hour or so each morning on WK, so I can’t spend more than 20 seconds or so per item on average. That includes answering as well as reviewing the ones I get wrong. The items I know go quickly — just a few seconds teach – but I often spend several minutes reviewing whenever I miss an item. If I’ve just forgotten it or it’s still pretty new, I review my mnemonics and try to burn it into my memory.
If it seems to be a “leech” that keeps moving down to earlier stages because I never seem to get the right for several reviews in a row, I try to figure out why. Usually it’s because its visually similar to some other character and I keep confusing the two. If so, I take the time to highlight the difference in my mind and add a note to both items to shortcut the process next time.
Sometimes with newer items I realize my mnemonic just doesn’t work, so I try to come up with something better.
Other times I realize I tried to answer instantly but I just got it wrong, which tells me I should probably still be using mnemonics and haven’t really moved the item to my long term memory. So I review the mnemonics accordingly.
Finally, I do my lessons. If I’m still early in a level, I rarely add more than five new radicals or kanji. If I’ve been in the level for a while, and I’ve started seeing new vocabulary (which are generally easier) I might do ten or twenty, but I try not to have more than 100 or so items in the “Apprentice” bucket. It gets frustrating if you have too many new, unlearned items in your review pile.
This process has worked well for me and proved quite painless. I’m still astonished almost daily at just how magical and effortless this whole process has been. Learning has never been so easy!