Your failed items at 12 pm will come again at 4, and then you get them at midnight.
By getting the first stage reviews correct 
But more seriously, you can do some extra studying of the new items between the first lesson and first review. But don’t do it right before, and not for higher level items.
Or if you start the first lessons at 7, even if you fail the first review and get the subsequent ones correct, last review of the day will be at 11.
Nope, I got all but 1 correct first time. The only thing I can think is maybe I somehow missed doing a review straight after the lesson. I dunno. Maybe this is an uncommon issue and I’m just good at breaking things 
The first two levels have different SRS timings. I think the apprentice stages are halved, so starting out you don’t have to wait as long.
Excerpt from WaniKani Knowledge Base:
For Level 1 & 2 the SRS timings are accelerated for the Apprentice stage.
Apprentice 1 → 2 hours → Apprentice 2
Apprentice 2 → 4 hours → Apprentice 3
Apprentice 3 → 8 hours → Apprentice 4
Apprentice 4 → 1 day → Guru 1
For future reference, doing lessons between 8 and 9, then hitting the 4 and 12 hour review timings, can potentially have you get reviews at midnight, if you make a mistake in the first review, then rereview at 4pm. For that reason I like to do lessons before 8am, reviews before noon etc.
Gah! How did I miss this info? Thanks @Saida, this makes a lot of sense now 
I’ll tweak my schedule until I get to level 3.
I’m on Level 21 and I do three sessions – 8AM, 2PM, and 8PM. I’m not looking to max out speed or level up in a week, just trying to manage my workflow. Yes, items will come in at midnight if I fail at my 8PM reviews, but they’re there in the morning which doesn’t bother me.
I use the Review Forecast a lot more than I used to now that I’m in the Death levels. For example, if I wake up to 120 reviews at 8AM but I’ll only have a few more added by 2PM, I’ll split up my 8AM review session into two more manageable chunks – for example I’ll do 70 reviews at 8AM, and then the remaining 50 will carry forward to the 2PM review along with whatever was already scheduled.
That info is on Chapter 2 of my Guide:
You probably missed it, because I don’t necessarily mention that levels 1 and 2 are different on chapter 4 (Building your own schedule). Will add a small note to that chapter to make it clearer 
Thanks @jprspereira. I think it was the sheer amount of info to take in just had me a bit confused. I read it all but it obviously didn’t sink in. Maybe we should make a srs deck for the onboarding content? 
Ok, new problem! (I’m having a few haha)… I thought level 2 was a fast level, and that all my kanji for this level would unlock at once. However, more than half of them are still locked. I’d planned to do them this afternoon but ended up subbing in vocab instead.
It’s fast, but not in the same way that the Reality levels are fast levels. Those are fast because most kanji unlock upon level up. Levels 1&2 are fast because apprentice srs timings are halved. You still have the second wave kanji to deal with in order to level up.
Good strategy to do vocab now, so you don’t end up with a massive level 2 vocab pile as you go into level 3.
but not in the same way, right?
what does it mean for a kanji / word to be “burned”? people seem to celebrate it as a good thing but I don’t know what it means or how to get there
It means that you’ve gotten an item correct so many times it will have reached the last stage, and you will have “burned” it into your memory. The item won’t appear in your reviews again.
(It is possible to resurrect burned items if you want to review it again, it will go back to apprentice stage.)
@Redglare handled the meaning on WaniKani, but I figured I would mention that it’s also a reference to the history of kanji. The oldest written evidence of kanji comes from turtle shells that had the kanji burned into them, for use in fortune telling. This also relates to the turtle motif of the site.
Thanks, it’s just the little quirks that take getting used to. I expected kanji to only unlock after my radicals gurued. To get some and not others I was like “is this a bug?” 
But no, as usual it’s a feature haha.
Your radicals didn’t get to guru yet? Or is it just that the new level already has some kanji from the off?
Nope, none of the level 2 radicals had been gurued. Like you said, they were there from the off - those few level 2 kanji unlocked at the same time the level 2 radicals unlocked. Now that I’ve gurued most radicals, all but two have now unlocked (and those that are still locked look like the radicals I got wrong last review (heaven vs king, and sword vs power 
)
I read all the things I was meant to before starting and still, all of my assumptions about how the wanikani system works are getting shook up lol. Ah well, best to run into these things now and learn how it all happens.
The way I thought it would work is if I got a certain percent (90%?) of radicals gurued, that all that level kanji would unlock at once.
Yeah, you probably understand now, but each radical is just directly tied to kanji which use it. And kanji are just directly tied to vocab that use them.
Some stuff is just gated off into later levels to smooth out the journey, which is why leveling up unleashes a torrent of other stuff too.
Yeah I think I’m getting the hang of it… so what happens if I guru all the kanji I have so far unlocked, but those final two take another week hypothetically. When does level 3 unlock?
Maybe I’m approaching this differently than others, but I’d like to be able to do projections over a few weeks, so that I can know what to expect on different days.
You need to guru 90% or more of the kanji for a given level to level up… Whatever that works out to. If you hit 90% and level up, it doesn’t matter what the status of any other kanji from that level is.
Ah ok, that’s where I got that “90%” figure from then. I get ya 
It’s starting to click.
It really seems like there are compounding losses from getting radicals wrong, so I will try my hardest not to 
Thanks so much for explaining things!!
I’m so sorry…people have obviously asked this before…but I’ve searched my Account page from Settings (yes, I went to the actual website, not from forums) and still can’t find where to get my API key. I also tried searching ‘Public API’ from Command+F (on a Mac) and it didn’t work. Where do I find it??
