the first wave of complaints was around lvl 14, calling it especially hard… which it’s really not, but many old reviews catch up by that time.
i’ve seen a lot of lvl 5/6/7 complaints, too, maybe people have gotten weaker and can’t take so much pain anymore.
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You can review items on your own as many times as you want by just clicking on your level icon and looking over the items you’ve learned. I think you’ll quickly find once you advance a bit though that the SRS items are all you’ll wanna do haha. If you’re in a mood for studying Japanese though and no WaniKani items are available, just study Japanese using a different resource. There’s a practically infinite number of alternate resources to take advantage of.
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Take WK like a game. Another game while you wait 
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Maybe I am yet to to grasp the intricacies of this system, I guess I just have to see how it is going. However, the problem of how to actually convey this to newcomers before they have levelled up beyond subscription, remains. And no, it’s not because people haven’t read the FAQ or the instructions, because I did, and I’m not stupid… 
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I can’t really say anything that someone else has not already said, but I would encourage you to give it some more time. The first couple levels are slow. It will quickly reach a point if you do lessons as soon as they pop up where if you skip a day you could end up with several hundred reviews waiting for you and 150 more coming that day. I get that feeling of excitment and wanting to study when you just start, I had that too. Give it some time, you may find the system to your liking. If not, there are other resources. What may not be finely tuned for you is working very well for many users.
Good luck with your kanji studies! I hope to see you around in the future.
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you don’t yet know what your workload will be. give the system some time, it will fill all the slots with stuff, and at the beginning, it’s easy going. it’s when you get swarmed by 200 reviews every day, out of which 25 just won’t stick and make you go “oh yeah, that fucker again” and destroy your motivation.
i’m not a white knight on a mission to defend wanikani. i’m just telling you how it is. with over a year of program even at max speed, and only a very small percentage of people not giving up, the statistics speak a clear message.
those first 3 levels are slow. they’re also boring. everything up to lvl 6ish is slow and repetitive, with the same damn counters for everything and lots of typing, like “forty second floor” and bullshit like that. until lvl 10, you won’t even need mnemonics, but then it slowly picks up steam. by lvl 20, you have a full backlog of things that won’t stick and need special attention, but newbies will feel the pain much earlier.
make use of the time by getting your schedule in order, you’ll need all the help you can get. just not yet at lvl 1, or 3, or even 7 (even though that’s when the moaning starts on the forums).
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Time is of the essence
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It’s already been said, but it can’t be emphasized enough:
Doing a lot of work when you’re highly motivated in an SRS system backfires when you’re later feeling unmotivated and have 400 reviews to do and all you want to do is not look at Japanese. This is the #1 concept that people miss and end up burning out due to. I have done it as well, as I’m a very impatient, immediate-rewards type of person. But you just can’t do that with an SRS system without hurting yourself. The key is to stick to a consistent pace that you can continue even when you’re unmotivated.
This is the only aspect of your study that will work this way. You can study grammar and read novels all day when you’re motivated and then do nothing the next day because you feel burnt and nothing bad will come out of it. But the spaced repetition makes that behavior destructive here.
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If you’re coming from other SRS programs, I can see why it might not be immediately clear why doing a bunch right away would come back to bite you.
If you do 100 items in a memrise or anki deck, that’s all that happens. You have those 100 active items until you tell the system to give you more (depending on how you choose to set it up).
Here, each radical you do is actually a bunch of items that you are committing to do, but you don’t see them all immediately.
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Btw, does anyone know if the following is still true:
I thought the first few levels had been made into “fast” levels that completed in a few days rather than a week? And why the heck isn’t the SRS timing listed on the FAQ page?!
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The first two levels are indeed “fast levels”, but for a different reason than later fast levels. Here the SRS pace is halved. Later fast levels just don’t have enough radicals to stop you from reaching 90% in one wave.
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The kanjis are coming…
Unfortunately this idea is genuinely really difficult to understand until you’ve actually been through it. It’s just not particularly intuitive with how we approach the rest of our lives. Or not with how I approach mine, anyway. That’s why there’s a speed limit in the first place - you can almost never tell someone to go as slow as they need to if they’ve never SRS’d before - they have no way to conceptualize how what they’re doing now will affect their future workload. You have to cap them.
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True, I think that line in the FAQ should be updated, though. Who would be the best person to tag for that?
I wonder if putting that “you are here” graphic would be an improvement, though? Rather than just saying “you’re workload will suck later, deal with it”? The graphic has been very useful in the forums.
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Give it time.
One of the unexpected things that new users have to deal with is that learning 2000 odd kanji like this is a hopeless endeavour without a memorization strategy. You can’t speed SRS up even if you feel really confident about it. If you can’t deal with the SRS system at level 1 then you’re probably better off using another method.
Good luck!
EDIT: There’s a gazillion things you can be doing whilst you’re waiting for reviews.
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Your percent correct on the review pages isn’t what matters. Radicals and kanji only unlock kanji and vocab when they reach Guru, and your percent Guru’ed is what unlocks the next level with new radicals.
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The usage of ‘expect’ and ‘assumed’ though. Was that before reading the FAQs or after?
This is not a statement which is valid in general. Might not be hard for you, but it definitely is hard for some.
meh
too stupid to use a spoiler.sorry.
Wth? 