Hi, you can do this on Tsurukame. Go to the settings (top right). As you level up, toggle the “Prioritize current level” setting (it’s under Lessons) so that you can jump into the new radicals straight away. Subsequently, you can turn the setting off to continue with last level’s vocabulary, while turn it on again to do some kanji.
Hope this helps!
Dude, you don’t need to spend that much time per day. You just need to know the srs intervals. 4h, 8h, 24h, 48h = 3.5 days (item becomes guru). Guru radicals first, then guru the rest of the kanji, that allows you to level up in 7 days. You should read this guide. My Journey of 368 days (+ The Ultimate Guide for WK 📖 ) - #2 by jprspereira
Whatever you do keep chipping away at them reviews daily. Add lessons when it’s suitable (at least once a week).
If you find something else to study along, then definitely slow down wk a bit. It takes effort and time to introduce something new.
Kamesame for me is also useful, as I go through burned wk items.
Yo dude lol we started at basiclaly the exact same time, 2 days before you, and we basically exact same level! So i can completely relate with you about just how much time this takes every single day. We should be study buddies!
Upon level up to say level 14, I finish vocab from level 12 if it’s there, and I use “Reorder Ultimate 2” and lesson filter for that. (For some reason WK randomly gives me Level 13 lessons before I’ve done all my Level 12 vocab lessons. Maybe that’s due to me using scripts thus confusing their vanilla ordering.) For vocab only days, I may do 12-16 lessons. Then once previous level cleared, I do radicals of Level 14 (and the number of radicals is getting smaller once you progressed, so this step is easy, can be tacked with old vocab).
Then I start 12 lessons per day streak with with 4 kanji + 8 vocab combo using lesson filter only. Provided 36 kanji’s per level, it takes 9 days. Then while waiting for kanji to guru, I’ll keep doing the rest of vocab, 12-16 lessons.
Just count number of lessons per level, and divide by number of days you want for level up. It will work on average. Levels have uneven number of lessons, so forcing number of days per level means unequal load in future reviews.
This is “Reorder Ultimate 2” link:
[Userscript]: Reorder Ultimate 2 [newest]
It has a bad reputation because people are abusing it skipping vocab completely.
I thought I could get away without it, but I need it because of my self-imposed rule of clearing all previous level vocab.
I never aim to have zero in lessons queue. With Vanilla WK, the day after you completed new radicals and kanji lessons, you may have zero lessons available, thus breaking streak on WK Heatmap. So I prefer to have 100-150 lessons pending, as long as I know that they all from current level or one below.
I would recommend doing all radical and kanji lessons as soon as you get them. This will maximize your leveling up to optimize your timeframe. Here are two different ways to accomplish this:
Specifically, I would not recommend leaving radicals and kanji to the whims of the random number generator/shuffler, if you are only doing a certain portion of lessons per day. This will drag out your leveling up.
The reason I recommend leveling up optimally (even if you still pace it out, at least doing radicals and kanji before waiting on vocab) is because you mentioned concerns about long-term recall if you were to leave vocab for later. However, my experience is that since vocab is not a bottleneck for leveling up, you can let the SRS system automatically work out which vocab (and hence which kanji and radicals) you’re having most issues with, in terms of long term recall.
Therefore, the vocab automatic SRS pacing will automatically take care of the long-term recall concerns you have. Just take as much time as you need with the vocab items, and you’ll find that recalling the kanji and radicals is no trouble at all.
The only exception to this I’ve found is for certain kanji that have primary readings that don’t appear in many vocab, so are sometimes difficult to recall. For these, all I focus on is getting the kanji to Guru level first, and then treating it like a vocab, where I allow it to slip down to Apprentice level if I’m having trouble with the reading. This is the best of both worlds in a sense: The leveling-up bottleneck is removed, but I can then take my sweet ass time learning the kanji properly.
I have found no issues with long term recall using this method.
However! Caveat: I have a lot of free time, so I’m spending multiple hours per day studying Japanese. And I also use other sites/tools to help reinforce what I’m learning through WaniKani. I use KaniWani to help reinforce vocab, and I just started using KameSame as an additional supplement, which I’m currently using to power through the early levels of WK material, finding that I have about a 98-99% success rate all the way up to level 12 so far (I’m currently level 15 on WK).
Additionally, I’m using BunPro to help learn grammar. I’ve gotten through N5 and N4 levels there, but when I started N3, I found it using more and more kanji I didn’t know, so I’ve slowed down progression on grammar so I can catch up with kanji and vocab. KameSame also helps greatly to support the unknown kanji and vocab that BunPro introduces, so that’s been very helpful as well.
Both KaniWani and KameSame are free (they accept donations, though, at least KS does). I highly recommend both. Thanks to the creators for providing these valuable tools! 
BunPro is free to try for one month. I would highly suggest trying BunPro for a month to see how you like it. I found it very helpful and useful. Got a lifetime subscription as soon as I could afford it. Totally worth it IMHO, even on my limited budget (admittedly it was on sale around Christmas time). But even if you don’t subscribe, that initial free month should probably help you kick-start your grammar learning.
So, with that main caveat in mind (that I have a lot of free time to dedicate to learning Japanese), you’ll probably need to take my suggestions with a grain of salt and adapt them to your situation (or ignore them completely if they don’t suit you! 
).
Happy adventuring! Cheers!
Thank you for sharing the stats!
You mean you reorder things - like other things in life to match reviews? Or you mean its possible to reorder kanjis showing up? I was thinking I could go faster if reading and meaning of kanji in reviews will follow each other, not mixing up with other kanji.
Hi all! Thank you so much for your continuous support!
I installed last night the reorder script in Firefox, and configured Tsurukame to behave similarly (I will see radicals and Kanji of the current level first now).
I’m following @seanblue recommendations to a tee (covering all radicals on day 1 + around 10 Kanji, then 10 Kanji per day, plus some vocab, and then a magical number of vocabulary that I have not confirmed yet)
This was magical btw, leveling up doesn’t feel like the worst part of the week now 
I’m expecting an increase in time from the current 8-9 days to a ballpark of around 15-18.
I will try to modify my daily cycles to consider these updates, measure them for some days, and then focus on the Book Club recommendations. My idea is to buy a specific e-book and just power through it.
I’ve done pretty much your first scenario, OP. I did my best to do WaniKani as fast as possible. I have seen the same issues.
I’d say I noticed all of this stuff happening about half way through. My retention really started to go down and it felt like more of a struggle. It was at this point in WK that I noticed I was picking up a lot of words when I was watching anime or youtube content, though, so I think it’s a great time to start putting native content at a higher priority.
I have just been really bullheaded about wanting to say I accomplished something tangible with this language. I’ve “learned” Japanese for most of my life and never really got past N5/N4 level proficiency. So doing WK has been a way to force myself to hit a goal, and for this reason it’s really done wonders for me. I know it would have been “better” for me to focus on other stuff, but I know I wouldn’t do as much as I could. It feels really good to see the WK lesson count go down, and say I learned 100+ new words in a week. And I do find the later content useful. For instance, I started reading the manga Ranma 1/2, and the main character’s name is Saotome Ranma 早乙女 乱馬. I just learned 早乙女 at level 59, and I can read that name no problem. It’s been rare that I can’t read a word in this comic.
In the end, it’s up to your priorities. I do think that going faster is better, and you don’t need to be sweating about getting everything 100%. Just keep adding a little by little and your proficiency will improve. A lot of times I end up cramming lessons, but they go by quickly because I’ve already learned most of the vocab with the kanji. Doing 5 or 10 vocab lessons is actually really easy, it’s just the mental block that stops me from doing it.
Whatever you do, never miss a day of reviews. And I’ve found that the WK example sentences got a lot more helpful in the last half of the levels. You may only get one sentence, but it often reinforces kanji and vocab that you already learned. It’s a sneaky way that they’ve incorporated extra review, and I’d recommend you utilize it. Ultimately, I’ve come out of this really sick of flashcards and whatever I do next, I want to avoid them for a while.
Are you only doing WK two times a day? If you don’t hit the first review intervals after the lessons (+4h and then 8h from that) it is going to slow you down and also increase the time you have to spend each day since you are not seeing the items enough.
It’s more about hitting the SRS interval fairly consistently, which means doing WK at least three times a day. Doing that and 20 lessons per day it’s very feasible to get under 10 day level ups spending 1-2 hours a day.
For example:
8am: do reviews and then lessons
12 o’clock: do the first review for those lessons
somewhere between 8pm and bedtime: do reviews before bed
I cannot guarantee anything other than my current schedule (at lunch and before bed). My life-work cycles do not allow me to do lessons or review in other intervals.
Wish I could, this would all be easier.
If you do 10 kanji a day you’ll probably level up near max speed still and risk getting behind on vocab. I only did 3 kanji a day, so just be careful. 
Oops, yeah. I basically copy pasted your suggestions into my daily tracker, I messed up the number in my comment. Thank you for your great support!
Hey @Leo-Tyrant, just wanted to post my appreciation for creating this thread. I’m in almost exactly the same position as you. I wanted to level up on WK as much as possible because it’s such a tangible measure of progress.
I too am at the stage where I always planned to slow down significantly and transition towards a lot more reading; all the suggestions here are super helpful.
I feel like I’m at the stage where I can no longer keep the WK knowledge without using it (aka reading). I’ve also noticed that whatever words I’ve encountered in the wild before encountering them in WK are far easier to remember.
IMO, at our levels, we have a critical mass of kanji in our heads to gain more knowledge through actual reading. At earlier levels, it might not have worked as well. All the best for your studies.
Thank you for your comments! I’m glad this topic helped to reassure your current approach.
I’m still in a transition (I want to decrease the accumulated number of lessons, no matter if it will take me the same 2-3 hours per day I didn’t have, for 1-2 more weeks)… aiming towards the milestone of just spending 1 hour in WK, leveling up in 15-20 days, and investing much more time in grammar, reading, etc.
We are WK brothers now, lets pick a book and see how we manage it.
If you want a quick calculation to see what your target pace should be, here it is:
Each level has ~150 items, which need to be reviewed 9 times minimum each = 1350 total reviews per level. These reviews are spread over six months (180 days), so 1350/180 = about 8 reviews each day per active level. Now factor in mistakes (which require TWO–or more–reviews to fix):
90% success → +25% makes 10 reviews per day per level
80% success → +66% makes 13 reviews per day per level
75% success → +98% makes 16 reviews per day per level
So if you are pretty good at reviews (90%) and don’t mind 150 reviews every day, you could shoot for 150/10 = 15 levels every six months, i.e. 12 days per level.
If you are making more mistakes (80%) and can only deal with 100 reviews each day, that’s 100/16 = 6 levels every six months.
As another Japanese learner from Costa Rica, it’s not so hard to get books imported with Correos de Costa Rica, but it sure is expensive!
I tend to use the grammar books from courses given at universities (UNA/UCR) you can by at photocoping shops nearby, just by asking a student where they buy them.
Hope this gives you another option! Pura Vida!
I’d definitely advise to slow down WaniKani, and focus more on grammar and other aspects of Japanese (or other aspects of your life!).
I’ve found a decent way to maximize WaniKani progress with minimum time investment:
Wait, did you mean slower?
Oath, make use of the example sentences whenever you can, since they’re usually the first time you see them used in context.