Hello there,
so I am only at Level 6 and my review forecast ist looking like this:
I am getting kind of scared when thinking of the higher levels… are there like 1000+ reviews a day for Level 40? 
I’d be glad to hear about your experiences.
Greetings
Nadarina
You should consider simply slowing down, otherwise yes it gets extremely challenging. For the later levels (after 40) you get something like 400 reviews a day if you keep at a maximum ish speed.
Simply take fewer lessons per day until you find your sweet spot
Doing a consistent number of lessons each day will keep your reviews manageable in the long term. Here’s a reply I wrote to a similar question:
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: you can control the pace and amount of reviews you get / day by controlling the number of lessons you do. Try to experiment a bit during these lower levels to find a pace that works for you and your other life commitments. Think long-term about how much time and effort you wanna put on WK and adjust the number of lessons accordingly. 
Additional answer: You can end up with 1000 reviews if you stop doing your reviews daily for long enough period of time. That’s different from what I understood as your main concern. Reviews won’t just suddenly add and add endlessly. If you have decent accuracy, items move up the SRS and get burnt and disappear from your review queue.
I’m not sure if it’s more or less daunting to see +0 every day…
I’m more or less at full speed and I’m already burning:
How much your reviews go up by depends heavily on the number of items you tend to fail and the speed you go at. It could either be really unlikely that you get 400 reviews a day, or you’ll get them every day if you fail a lot.
Here’s what it looks like at level 50. I’m leveling up every 9 days or so. It amounts to around 90 minutes of work a day, which I find managable.
Level 11 taking 9 to 12 days to complete each level.
Keep an eye on your Apprentice items and try to stay below 100, with Guru I try to stay below 300 (currently 249)
Like Gorbit99, I am also going “almost” full speed. Average level-up time is 7 days 9 hours.
At my current level L36, my review forecast is like this:
While I go most of the time full-speed, I will certainly slow-down when real-life stuff demands my full attention.
For me, that means:
How to slow down
- Taking no lessons (or limiting it to the absolute minimum I can manage)
- Focusing on the review queue only
- If I can anticipate that I need to slow down, start 1-2 weeks before, because until you notice the slow-down in your review forecast it will take a while because of how SRS works
The important thing is to always do your reviews, but skip lessons. You don’t need to do all lessons in one go. Manage it in chunks, or take a few days off. BUT, if you let reviews slip, it will only get even more daunting.
A general advice is to not do lessons when your Apprentice queue is >100. If you want to slow down, try to keep it at around 60 or even lower.
On top of the advice given by others, I notice that you have +131 tomorrow but +0 on Thursday, +12 on Friday and +115 on Sunday.
It looks like you don’t spread your lessons and do everything as they become available (I think?). You should try limiting your new lessons per day to around 20~25 (you won’t go faster by doing more anyway since you need a minimum of one week to level up at this stage).
If you still want to go full speed I recommend the use of a reorder script to do the radicals first (and then the kanji once the radicals have been guru’d). This way you can still go full speed but you don’t have to do dozens of vocab lessons at once when you unlock a new level.
If you take your current weekly review load of 634 you can see that with a more regular review load you’d have around 60 to 70 reviews a day, which would be a lot easier to manage especially if you break it into two or three sessions.
Yeah, I think it’s best to be flexible here. If you suddenly notice a dip in accuracy, with more items falling back to apprentice or guru from the upper SRS-levels, that’s a time to slow down a bit. You don’t have to do it much to still make a difference, like adding an additional day you take to level up, can help you clear out items falling back down the SRS.
Also @Nadarina once your burn items starts coming back to you, you might wanna make additional adjustments to the number of lessons you do, to accommodate the workload of burn reviews.
In short: just adjust the number of lessons as you go and make sure there is always time for your IRL things foremost to have a good life balance while studying.
Also, if for some reason you don’t want to slow down there’s always the possibility to make reviewing faster. I find that having undo lets me go much faster since I don’t have to focus as much on every answer and be paranoid with typos.
If you don’t type fast (or do you reviews on mobile where it’s usually slower anyway) you can also use scripts to switch meanings and/or readings to anki mode where you just press “yes/no” buttons if you remembered correctly. I personally use anki mode for meanings when reviewing on mobile.
If you can review dozens of items per minute going through a stack of hundreds of reviews become more manageable and you can focus on the stuff you have difficulties with as you zoom past the content you know well.
Sorting by ascending SRS Level will make clearing out Reviews in several batches easier. A less-than-ideal solution is native in WaniKani, sorting by ascending WaniKani Level, but could work too.
There might be some time period between stop doing Lessons and clearing out Reviews; otherwise, forgetting to put on Vacation Mode. Some sorting (reorder) may help.
I don’t recommend putting Kanji first. If anything, put vocabularies first. Keeping vocabularies away until you forget Kanji will become a debt later on.
I’m going full speed so far and my review forecast for the week is currently 906.
But with the new lessons an inevitable mistakes, it’s usually 200-300 reviews per day.
Remember that you’re the one controlling the speed, you’re absolutely free to go slower, this will decrease the number of reviews.
Thanks for the numbers. I can’t quite remember the first rounds for me. You might be interested in a comparison here.
So, I’m not going max speed. It’s not 6 days and X hours, I forget the max speed time for level up, but you can do it under 1 week.
For me, I’m between 7-8 days per level (median 7 days, 21 hours, 7 minutes) and only that minor change I think has a huge difference in numbers of reviews so far compared to closer to 7 days 1 hours etc. I keep reviews below 200 or just above 200.
It’s defo an easier pace that for me doesn’t require much effort per day.
The big ? is how I’ll fair once I get burn reviews, which I don’t have yet for almost another month. So, that could mean going down to 8-9 days per level maybe, to just give myself more breathing room.
1 days seems not much at all, but it means the difference between having certain guru items up for review or not and so, that’s the type of calculation I’m going with now. It’s still a work-in-progress, but so far so good!
Good luck with your own studies @SketchingDays! Are you in the Buddy Race thread? 
For some friendly competition? 
I started burning a little while ago:
I had a big review spike for the very first burns because the first two levels are faster than usual, so you effectively burn two levels in one week if you were going fast.
Burn reviews, especially early on, should be mostly trivial at this point. I only really messed up some day counting vocab because screw everything about those.
Burning cards feels pretty satisfying and rewarding, so I have a higher tolerance for those. If I see in my timeline that I have a big chunk of 30 burns coming up, it doesn’t feel as bad as 30 apprentice reviews.
So yeah, it does add a significant amount of reviews, I went from a ~700 weekly forecast to over 800, but those reviews (so far) are usually pretty fast and effortless.
I think long term the main issue is that I do fail a small portion of these reviews, and of course these leeches are immediately downgraded to guru and will eventually accumulate.
My plan remains to continue at one level/week until level 40 where I’ll slow down, I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of burning out but I think I’ll manage to stay strong till then.
You can always take a lesson break, and I recommend it if you need a rest. I have taken months long lesson breaks, while keeping up reviews. Try not to stop reviews. You’ll notice your daily reviews start to decrease during the rest.
stop doing all the lessons
create a max number for your apprentice, for me it is 100, if it is below I do 5 new lessons, otherwise, I spend days without any new lesson.
retention is better than speedrunning.
I actually saw your post and was very surprised at your review count indeed! I too noticed the discrepancy! I don’t think a couple of hours of difference would have that kind of effect (my average is 6days 23 hours).
I think you just have divinity level accuracy and I don’t frankly : P If I believe wk stats my accuracy is 95%, but honnestly in reality I think it’s closer to 85% which is why I’m getting so hammered : P (wk stats counts both reading and meaning separately so it inflates the numbers).
I’d gladly join the race thing if I knew how to do it XD I checked that thread multiple times and for the love of me, have no idea how to join in : P
