Since level 17 or so, I’ve been powering through Wanikani, doing it every single hour that I’m awake for 80% of the days or so
I feel kinda tired now that I’m almost level 30 and I feel like taking 1 week or 1 month break from it, but taking a break might ruin my momentum
Thoughts?
I think it might be a good idea to either take a break or maybe to slow down your pace a bit.
Then again, it depends on you. It is also possible that just keeping the same pace without stopping – might be the best way for you.
But in my opinion the fact that you start feeling tired indicates that you really need a break or taking a slower pace.
When I joined WK, I wanted to do it the fasest way possible. I powered up to around your level, then the problems started, but I keep pushing forward until I got to level 36. That’s when I stumbled, let my reviews pile up and then spent almost a year trying to muster the strength to tackle them all. Ended up realizing that it’s better to do a reset and start moving again than to keep staying on the same spot for a year.
Anyway, the point is: if I had taken a break or slowed down my pace when I started to feel tired – then maybe I wouldn’t have stumbled on level 36 
In any case, best of luck with your studies! 
You should be setting times that you do reviews (once or twice a day max). Doing it every time reviews are available is gonna kill you.
I found that doing it every hour takes each stack of the day after the first down to less than 5 minutes each per hour so it’s actually super fast after the first stack that I do after I wake up
I generally don’t do WaniKani unless review is above a set number, and then try to clear it.
Maybe twice a day, if it’s a lot. If too many, reordering strategies, and won’t try to finish today. Decision, rather than impossibility.
easiest thing if feeling overwhelmed…stop doing lessons but keep doing reviews
be it hourly or 2x a day whatever…just don’t “take a break” keep up reviews or you’ll fall into the pitfall many do and come back in a few months and then it will be another omg i have 3000 reviews do i reset 
do your reviews no new lessons and when it settles down and you start itching for new lessons then add them back in… don’t sweat it
rule no 1 ) never stop doing srs reviews
most important rule no 2) see rule no 1
I learnt about the vacation mode pretty early on by reading the forum tho it’s still no problem if I have to grind 300 reviews every single day for 2 weeks to clear em
powering through Wanikani
Meaning what? How many lessons to you take per day?
doing it every single hour that I’m awake
This sounds like a good idea until you do it for a while. You are expected to do your reviews for years, not weeks. It will kill your ability to focus long term.Limit yourself to few sessions per day. If that means your reviews will pile up, you are going too fast.
taking 1 week or 1 month break from it
Don’t kill the habit. Slow down to few lessons, maybe 5 per day, and do reviews at least once per day.
What are you trying to achieve?
Finish Wanikani as soon as possible and move on to other languages. I have to keep grinding for another 10 months if I don’t slow down or take a break
Well, I guess that answers your question then, no?
I’m also on level 17 and have slowed down significantly over the past month. I mostly focus on reviews which have dwindled to 30-40 per day, and do lessons occasionally when I have the energy. I wouldn’t quit entirely based on the posts from other users who came back to a mountain of reviews. Better to spend ~15-20min every day instead of going cold turkey.
that seems like an odd goal to me.
If you want to do stuff with Japanese, then WK level 29 is definitely enough that kanji are not going to be your bottleneck for getting into that. And I think for a lot of people it’s more effective to treat WK as a thing on the side of all the other Japanese study and use, rather than thinking of L60 as a prerequisite for getting started.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to get into actually using Japanese and you’d rather move onto other languages then I think you’d be better off doing that right now. Otherwise you’re committing to ten months grinding for a skill you don’t want to use and which you’ll immediately start forgetting when you move on.
You misunderstood. I want to finish Wanikani as soon as possible because I want to buy lots of Japanese books when I go to Japan again (Manga, light novels, business books, history books, etc)
but aside from reading Japanese books+ game texts and reading stuff when I’m in Japan, I don’t think I will use my Japanese reading skills most of the time.
There are plenty of content from every country and language, no need to stop at Japanese. I also like to travel to other countries
Anyways, I have decided to set my Wanikani account on vacation mode and go on a one month break when I hit level 32
Possibly continuing unsolicited advice, but please don’t think that finishing WaniKani will somehow magically transform you to someone who can read Japanese. You need quite a bit of grammar and also just learning how to read in addition, both things that WaniKani doesn’t teach you. WaniKani doesn’t teach enough vocabulary either. (The short example sentences are not enough.)
The happy news is that by L30 you’re more than capable of starting progress on the other two fronts. True progress is better measured by pages read rather than reviews done.
Definitely not, but after two years of getting to level 60 I’m feeling I just barely got started. I started reading around level 10 onwards, easy manga at first.
During this journey it was the breaks (trips to Japan) that made me regress the most on the WaniKani front. Of course balanced by progress in many more important areas.
Ah, I see, sorry for the misunderstanding. In that case I agree with @eagleflo: the thing standing in your way between where you are now and being able to read those manga, LNs, etc, is almost certainly not the last 30 levels of WK, it’s all the other stuff that makes up Japanese, and it might be worth taking a more holistic look at what the most effective use of your overall study time would be to achieve your goals. (The obvious exception here is if you already have full conversational fluency via a purely-spoken language learning path, could understand this material if it was an audiobook, and now only need to catch your written language skills up.)
I am already largely fluent in speaking Japanese due to speaking Japanese every single day on VRchat during the pandemic
Unless I move to Japan or start doing business with the Japanese, I doubt I will learn to write advanced stuff in Japanese
If something is making you burn out, a break is theoretically ok.
But as a person who’s very susceptible to turning “breaks” into years-long stopping, I can 100% understand the reluctance to ruin your momentum.
So maybe a compromise. Set yourself a timer and do whatever reviews in that time per day, but otherwise take a break. Put an event on your calendar for a week or a month from now to go back to full speed.
Or something like that.
I am feeling like you at this very moment. I decided to slow down and don’t spend more than 30-45 mins a day on WK, compared to the previous 1-2 hours. I feel better now. I cannot process the idea of taking a break on vacation mode, I rather log in just for 10 mins reviews.
I don’t want to slow down, I want to completely stop doing Wanikani and do something else so I stop feeling burned out. I will probably hardcore grind French with the time instead
After I come back from the break, I will grind nonstop until I finish level 60