Personally, I would ‘reorder’ every review session and work from highest to lowest SRS, that way you’re always progressing the items that you have out of apprentice, and slowly chipping away at your apprentice pile once you get through your higher SRS items.
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As schtitt said, the struggle definitely helps, don’t just move on. If you can work your brain to find the answer, you should, that builds the connection that will last.
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Well that shows that WaniKani is working. 
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Read Japanese.
Before WK I could read 0 kanji. Now I’m working through my 1st Manga and I already recognize at least half the Kanji. The rest are almost all Kanji that I’ll see again on WK later on. This Manga was written for children, but even so I’d say that’s not bad for 5 months of study. WK teaches Kanji. Reading them is the way to remember long-term.
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I know this was proposed and rejected earlier in the thread, but I’ll try again. Given that you seem to making little progress shrinking your review pile, and taking these stats into consideration, why don’t you reset to, say, level 30? That would knock off a nice chunk of your reviews, leaving you with stuff you are much more likely to pass. Seems like that would be faster and less painful than what you are doing?
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For what it’s worth, as an old-school language learner, the “forever” threshold seems to be about 3 years of regular use (barring very young ages).
Once you’ve hit that point, you never forget it. Use it or lose it - but after 3 years of regular use, it’s not ever really lost - it just might take a little prompting to get it back. Kind of like forgetting about a childhood story until someone gives you a clue, and then you remember the whole story - you don’t forget it after a certain point, but you might need a reminder.
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The main reason for my slow pace of reviews is that whenever I fail to recognize a kanji I usually look at the lesson page for the unknown kanji. I’ll often look up similar looking kanji or similar words or things I confused it for etc. to try to remind myself of the difference as well.
Sometimes I do puzzle over a word and/or kanji during the review itself, trying to remember it as well.
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Makes sense. I do that too, just not when I have a lot of reviews to get through. 
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(U-force…!!! XD whoa how did people not punch that screen right off onto the floor and destroy it??)
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You are doing amazingly!!! I’m sure you already mentioned this somewhere above, but what is your aimed-for pace – reviews/day?
That running to stay in place is so true! xD I was having a hell of a time moving forward with anything less than 100/day when I had to pile my way through my first neglect-related XL queue. Two 50-item batches per day was my rule. I finished it only just a few days ago, and it took several weeks (er…months?), but that’s partly because I kept petering out once I’d get it down to 300 left. (On the last two days I just banged out the 200 or so at once because I was finally getting to the point where I felt like if I didn’t throw myself a bone I was going to give up.) At the beginning of it all I started at 40-60% success or so…maybe lower…and my queue was roughly 1200. After bringing that up to 70%, I noticed waves of “new” (enlightened) old batches of kanji that would come in and knock me down with sudden low success rate after I’d been getting used to being at low 70s or so, and the first few times that happened I was discouraged until I figured out that it wasn’t me “failing” – it was me essentially getting a chance to learn kanji fresh again, only instead of being labeled “lessons” these were in the review queue to begin with and in order to “unlock” them as lessons (bring them back to apprentice level where they belonged) I would have to miss them a number of times. So thinking of them that way helped me to ride out the waves of unfamiliars as they came in. Basically I was like, “The kanji I know here I am getting a 90% success on, the ones I sort of know I’m getting maybe 70%, and those that I don’t know I’m getting something like 0-15% on, and the quicker I can rack up those misses, the quicker the ‘new’ kanji will enter my queue at their appropriate apprentice frequency so that I can learn them through exposure.” So that helped me stick to the 100/day. And I did make it! 100/day was Trunklayer’s recommended rate for moving through the ever-enlargening queue, such that it would actually be decreasing enough to make up for my misses, and it worked great!
Instinct is huge. I have been stunned at the number of readings that I definitely don’t know on a conscious level that I still got right. It’s definitely not chance. Sometimes I’d get them right and burn them and be like “nooooooooooo i don’t really know that one” but honestly? I clearly do know it. And many have been like that. I also think that many of the 2000-some that are burned are pretty tenuous, tenuous enough that I’ll be having interference from higher-level kanji that are vague lookalikes. So maybe after I’m done I will re-open levels to try and basically make it a more rolling 10>60>10>60 circle of reviews so that I can really test against the whole bunch. Because I’m just going gradually toward 60 rather than trying to do it in a set number of months, I am not moving quickly enough to be honestly testing against all the very similar kanji I will encounter and that makes me nervous.
Thank you for sharing the particulars of your review sessions and your accuracy rates divided by burned/not burned. That’s super helpful and interesting! <3
Best best best best best 頑張って to you, senpai!! (^ - ^)_v
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I spent most of the day traveling, so I didn’t do any reviews beyond this morning’s session. I’m on vacation for the next week, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be spending on WK.
Tue May 25 2021:
Time spent: 16m
Reviews completed: 32
Reviews remaining: 6149
Accuracy: 50.00% (16/32)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 72.73% (8/11)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 38.10% (8/21)
Current item counts:
Apprentice: 2995
Guru: 1253
Master: 1235
Enlightened: 3025
Burned 409
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Unfortunately, it turns out that the internet at the place I’m staying isn’t entirely reliable. Every once in a while, it will momentarily lose the connection, forcing you to refresh, which is an issue when doing Wanikani reviews.
I tried to do some reviews this morning, but 12 minutes in, it popped up the “Lost connection to server. Refresh?” thing, and I lost all progress in the review session on partially answered questions (I had 12 questions fully answered at that point).
So I’ll go ahead and post the update from this morning and then avoid Wanikani until I get back from vacation. Incidentally, the review forecast says I’ll have 6413 reviews by Sunday night, so I’ll soon actually be at a higher review count than when I started!
Wed May 26 2021:
Time spent: 12m
Reviews completed: 12
Reviews remaining: 6159
Accuracy: 50.00% (6/12)
Accuracy on resurrected items: 60.00% (3/5)
Accuracy on non-resurrected items: 42.86% (3/7)
Current item counts:
Apprentice: 2995
Guru: 1257
Master: 1231
Enlightened: 3023
Burned 411
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Wow so literally the next day I check my level 20 email from Koichi and it says this:
Many people don’t realize this, but there’s a step after “burned” when it comes to your kanji / vocabulary, and that step is reading. At Level 20, you should be able to do that. It may not be pretty (yet), and it may still be difficult (depending on your grammar levels), but reading is what will get you to that next step. Even though it won’t be easy, it’ll take your Japanese to the next level.
So WaniKani itself acknowledges and endorses this.
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I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the level 60 email endorses this even further.
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(put on vacation mode?) sorry I’m sure you know to do this but I got this cold chill of terror and couldn’t keep myself from mentioning it to you just in case
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What would the fun in that be? It’s not like the SRS intervals matter in my current situation anyway.
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that’s so hardcore. 
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That’s right! One should be totally Zen about this 
. Reviews come, reviews go. And we’re all in this endless current of curves and strokes in black ink.
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I was about to ask if reading could make what I learn on Wanikani stick in my brain forever?
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It should help a lot.
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