find a Japanese teacher and take some private lessons, it might give you some more motivation/inspiration.
Congratulations on making it this far! Most people don’t event get to level 9, so you’re already committed. 
these feelings are very common, and a good chance for you to remember why you’re learning Japanese. Do you want to keep reading manga even after the “textbook”? WaniKani will absolutely help you with that! And the longer you’re here, the more you will feel better about those early kanji. I’m guessing that you have just begun sending items to Enlightened? Once you start burning things in another ~4 months, you will definitely start to feel where you are confident and where you need more work. 頑張れ！
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I’ve been learning Japanese since I started university 8 years ago, and I never bothered learning kanji when I started classes because most of the early level lessons didn’t focus on it, thats why to this day I still suck at it even 8 years later I can speak and understand fairly easily but I am practically illiterate in Japanese because of the Kanji, so when you’re just starting out don’t worry too much about remembering everything but its great that you actually started with kanji unlike me
Just keep going. Slow down with lessons if you feel like you need to. Don’t worry about getting things wrong. You’re going to get things wrong, it’s inevitable. It’s part of learning.
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I was in the same boat as you, hit level 9 and really hit a wall in terms of accuracy with the kanji presented. It can be very discouraging but one thing I did find with these levels is that once I managed to get past the kanji and dug into the vocabulary, everything started to make a lot more sense and my accuracy improved enough to get through.
I would absolutely recommend using other resources than WK and textbooks, like reading manga/books/news articles, playing a game, listening to podcasts/music, whatever you may be interested in. I find doing something that’s a bit more geared towards the fun side of things can quickly decrease the frustration.
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You’ve worked hard and made lots of progress. Look at where you were two months ago. Celebrate the change… Okay?
Wanikani uses the visual, audio learning method. Try taking a few kanji you’re struggling with (say 3 to start with) and draw them. Repeat the sound as you draw, visualize what it means. Sing, chant, use funny voices if it helps. Do this five times for each of your selected kanji.
Small numbers, too many takes too much time. Repeat the exercise tomorrow with the same kanji. Remove and set aside the easy to remember sound-meaning. Add new ones to replace them.
You should also consider the balance of vocabulary and grammar study. One day vocab, one day grammar, back and forth?
- Find a number for your apprentice level that feels comfortable.
- Do a constant amount of lessons every day to stay around that number.
- When you are doing the lessons really try to focus on the mnemonic if it feels like a word you won’t remember. ( This has helped me immensely as I hit the wall of content that comes after lvl 11/12 and while I try to maintain a level up time below 8 days.)
One of my biggest mistakes has been not using mnemonics with vocab. I’ve slowed down on vocab lessons to utilize the mnemonics. Naturally, the result has been higher accuracy scores on new vocab and fewer leeches.
Also, grammar becomes infinitely easier to learn when you already know the words in the sentence. This fact should yield some motivation to continue slogging through wanikani even when it’s hard or you feel burn out.
Like so many, I’ll also suggest slowing down. Celebrate what you do know, though. I’m at level 19 (I think), and there are certain Kanji I expect I’ll be mis-remembering for a long time to come (for some reason I get idea/breath/thought jumbled together in my head. But there are so many others than I’ve learned for sure–burned (you get to burn Kanji in 4 more months!) into my memory. I know them as well as I know anything in my life, and I think that’s amazing. Sure, sometimes you’ll mess up, but you know which ones you have definitely learned, and you didn’t have a clue about them two months ago. That’s a huge accomplishment!
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I have currently hit the wall at level 25. I went slower from level 20 onwards already, doing fewer lessons and also not levelling up immediately, but right now just everything seems to kick me. The burned items kick me (because I never bothered with synonyms in my earlier levels and now it kicks me hard) and even though I am currently only working with 70 Apprentice items, somehow the workload does not get lesser and the same kanji come back and back and back and my brain just refuses to memorize them, no matter what I try. 60 leeches among 67 apprentice items. Yup. I am struggling hard with these fuckers XD
But one day my brain WILL give in and WILL remember them. So I just do the reviews, keep my patience and sanity and maybe in a month I will feel comfortable again with new lessons. Until then I will do 0 lessons and just motivate me to do my reviews twice a day. I think the only way to get through this is stubbornness, patience and humour.
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ah, we both started in 2017 hahah 
I speed leveled all the way to lv21 and then had to stop for like, a year due to an important academic year (ehm also due to procrastination and slacking off)… then reset to level 13 when I came back and am now back on track. funny how I thought I was going to end wanikani in just a year when I first started lmao
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I know it can be super frustrating getting your reviews wrong, especially when it is an item you thought you had masted and is now suddenly stuck in apprentice. I think other people are right in that you may just want to focus only on reviews for a few days. Level 9 in two months is really fast IMO which is why items may be slipping from your memory. If you dont want to slow down I would just put less stock in your accuracy %. What really matters is that you are doing your reviews and there will be some times when your memory is spot on and others when it is not. When my reviews are low consecutively I just want to give up too but right or wrong you are still learning even if it doesnt feel like it!
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I bought Lifetime cause I KNEW I needed more time! 
Yet I still tried to make it in a year =P (pushed 7 day levels =P )
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Just wanted to pop in and say I am EXACTLY the same right now. The first eight levels were a nice balance and for some reason with Level 9 my accuracy has slipped from 85-90% consistently right down to the 60-75% range. The mnemonics are becoming more of a stretch to remember, so that’s been my biggest challenge.
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Not going to lie, you did blister through a bunch of levels in a short amount of time.
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I started at about the same time as you (a week or two later), I tried to go as fast as possible but after getting exhausted (full time work, 2 year old kid, and trying to learn Japanese) I quickly realised that it wasn’t the way. Reading the forums, the FAQ and the level 60 threads, I made some changes and although I am going slower it is way more pleasent, and I am doing grammar as well.
As almost everyone has said, limit the amount of items in you apprentice to around 100, so nmow I only do lessons once it drops, don’t focus on the time.
I do two x online 1 on 1 lessons a month with a teacher and we work on grammar. I review that same grammar using Bunpro to SRS it and get the points stuck.
I was also going to use kitsun.io to learn addition vocab and review vocab for the lessons, but that ended up being too much, so rethinking that. Maybe will create my on SRS decks just for the Vocab I am doing. But I am not stressing.
I like doing grammar with Kanji as I am learning Vocab in both places and the start constructing and understanding sentences easier.
Don’t burn yourself out! slow down. Enjoy it, and you can probably start to speed up again as you go on once you become more comfortable. I am aiming for around 10-12 days a level, depending on how my accuracy goes, but again the focus is not on leveling, but learning the content.
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Which is pretty crazy because I was stuck on Level 1 for over a month due to Tsurukame not synching with the API and not giving me my next set of lessons. xD I think it was 45 days stuck on Level 1 according to wkstats.
Back when I was on Level 6 I posted here asking how my speed was and I started structuring my reviews more rigidly – only doing reviews 3 times a day at set times instead of whenever they popped up, and only doing 20 lessons a day. Now that I’ve noticed that I’m struggling a bit more I’ve cut the new lessons down to 5-10 a day.
I’m about to hit Level 10 and honestly I’m not sure if I’m ready. I think I might try and get my reviews down to a smaller daily size (and solidify the kanji I’m still struggling with) before I even start the new lessons.
Couple times? Level 9 took me a month lol. I am not joking. The struggle is real. But no where else to go but forward
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