A week (or a bit more) ago I’ve been at level 2 with the number of pending lessons at around 30-40 (been doing around 5-10 lessons a day, depending on their type). One moment I saw that the number of lessons is getting close to 10 and I was, ehm, happy? Then I did 5 reviews and wanikani decided to boom that number of lessons to 100+ at once, there I got to level 3.
I started doing 15-20 lessons a day, now (after around a week) nearly finished everything. Usually, I’ve been doing not more than 20-30 reviews a day (and the number of pending reviews was never more than 20). But today there’s been boom #2 — got 70+ reviews at the same time.
I assume that’s gonna be even hotter with greater levels, so just want to know what to be prepared for: assuming that I do 15-20 lessons a day and do all my reviews in time, what are the “okay” numbers of pending lessons/reviews at higher levels (10+? 30+?).
I’d feel better when I know that I do everything okay and that wanikani will not force me to commit suicide tomorrow by telling “yo, wanna do some 99999 reviews in the next hour? or maybe 66766 lessons?”
Everyone has their own pace, so there are no absolute “okay or rip” numbers ^^
That said, I’d recommend focusing first on reviews, then doing some lessons when the number of reviews goes down. A good indicator is the number of “Apprentice” items. I’m personally comfortable with around 100 of them, so when there are over 100, I stop doing lessons until that number drops.
EDIT: The ultimate timeline userscript can help getting an overview of your review schedule and plan accordingly:
Everyone has different opinions about it, but personally I don’t worry about pending lessons. I do 5-15 lessons a day, used to do larger batches but stopped after the review piles got to large. I often have over 100 pending lessons when I just got to a new level. On the other hand, I don’t let pending reviews sit there. I do them as soon as they arrive, or a few hours later at the latest. Since I don’t do huge lesson batches, this means I usually only get 10-20 reviews at a time, sometimes up to 50 if I’m unlucky.
If you’re already doing a set number of lessons per day rather than all lessons as soon as they come up, I think that’s already really great If you do all of your lessons in big batches, then they’ll always come back for review in really big batches, which gives you horrible spikes (some people don’t mind, but I’d rather smooth them out as much as possible!).
Personally, I do between 12 and 24 lessons per day, and it takes me about 8 days to level up, assuming I don’t mess up. I’ve been getting burn reviews for a few months now, and I’d say I get about 150 - 200 reviews each evening. This will vary based on your accuracy, but if that seems doable to you (70+ may seem horrifying now, but it’s not so bad once you get more comfortable with everything), then your pace seems great. Otherwise, you might want to slow down a little - you can always speed up later!
I do lessons in the morning, the 4-hour reviews at lunchtime, and then nearly all of my reviews come up in the evening. Personally I prefer that kind of schedule to just doing them whenever they’re available, but you may prefer doing them whenever.
You might want to check out the Ultimate Timeline script, which can be really helpful in visualising what you’ve got coming up:
It really comes down to personal preference. I like to do 25 lessons a day, but this leads to a dichotomy where some days I have lessons to do and some days I don’t.
I think it’s more important to find ways to keep wanikani enjoyable than worry about your exact strategy. If you find yourself looking forward to putting an hour or two into wk each day, the lessons and reviews will evaporate on their own.
That said, my strategy does lead to some uneven review schedules. Some days I’ll have under 100 reviews coming, then out of nowhere I’ll get smacked with 350. And that’s before doing the apprentice level reviews that come back the very same day.
I also fall in the category of users who prefer to keep their Apprentice items close to 100–but for me, I only do this now because I learned my lesson the hard way when I started getting snowed under with 500+ reviews a day around level 40. This led to me getting frustrated, disappearing off WK for a year without setting vacation mode because I kept telling myself I’d come back, coming back to a backlog of 3,000-ish reviews that I couldn’t keep up with, and finally cutting my losses and resetting my level down to 30 and redoing 12 levels after getting my apprentice items down to a reasonable number (this took several months even with the reset).
By keeping my Apprentice items close to 100, my daily reviews now usually range from 80 to 200 a day at my current level, which is much more doable and seems to be keeping me from getting frustrated and derailed again.
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If you do all of your lessons in big batches, then they’ll always come back for review in really big batches, which gives you horrible spikes (some people don’t mind, but I’d rather smooth them out as much as possible!).