Hello,
I recently hit level 7 and I would like advice on how to balance revies and lessons at this point. Up to this point I’ve been doing 20 lessons a day and all my reviews for that day. Rinse and repeat daily. I’m just worried that if I keep this up then it will get overwhelming. Any and all advice is welcome.
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As long as you don’t get overwhelmed you can keep your pace steady. When you get overwhelmed reduce the number of lessons and do all your reviews for the day.
A useful tip is to keep an eye on the number of apprentice items. The bulk of your reviews are apprentice items. If you control the number of apprentices you control the number of reviews. A number of 100 is a good starting point. When you have more than 100 apprentices stop doing lessons until the number of apprentices is back under 100, then resume doing lessons.
The 100 target is a only starting point. You can adjust it upwards or downwards depending on how you feel about the resulting workload.
If it does get to that point, you can make an adjustment and take fewer lessons, right? But if you’re getting by just fine for now, don’t worry about it.
Simple stuff, don’t overthink it 
The apprentice items is a pretty good way of looking at things and the bulk of the effort imo. In the long term consider that at some point you’ll be getting reviews for apprentice + guru + master + enlightened + burn in the same day. I see it as managing energy to learn new material and managing the available time to do reviews.
When I was at a higher level I think I spent like an hour and a half to two hours a day on reviews + lessons doing fast levels (I had a long commute on public transit which helped). At that point accuracy was really important since that meant keeping stuff out of the apprentice learning stage, so I found it really helpful to slow down and focus on mnemonics, reading out loud, ect. which in turn reduced the number of apprentice items.
IIRC, ~20 lessons a day when optimizing order is usually a 7 day level up. While I’m on team fast, I don’t think it’s necessary and many would argue against it. If you haven’t already read it, jprspereira’s guide has a few sections that cover the detailed logic if you want to fine tune the process. Otherwise, I think following a simple metric like apprentice items or doing X lessons/day are good enough for the vast majority of people.
Edit: I forgot, Kumirei made a nice little chart showing the impact of accuracy on reviews in her simulation thread
use the above mentioned strategy about apprentice to 100 max.
It has been two days I have 96 lessons but not doing any of them because my apprentice is 113 now. While I dont decrease this number I wont touch any lesson.
I actually constantly wonder about this number too, but in the end it’s a very individual thing to decide.
I usually like to take a few days break from lessons after finishing all the vocabulary from a level. This is not very efficient and I’m not going at the fastest pace, but I’m not one of the people who speedrun and try to optimize everything.
I also like to decide the number of lessons on what is available. Like when I have radicals I usually finish them in 1-2 days, but for kanji I like to keep it slow with 5-10 kanji per day (+ if I feel like it reorder and do some vocab or only do vocab lessons if I don’t feel like doing kanji at all).
My apprentice items are usually between 50 and 90. (But most of the time closer to 50 or below)
If you want to have a look at another factor besides apprentice item’s count, you could also look at the accuracy of your reviews. If your accuracy is constantly lower than 80% it’s probably a good time to go at a slower pace.
FWIW, level 7 was the first level I noticed a jump in difficulty and had to slow down. I think what you are experiencing is just normal.
That chart is depressing. I’d advise not looking at it and just keep doing reviews.
Hah! I have to give WK a lot of credit for how well they manage to break apart all of those kanji and related vocabulary into an approachable format. It’s so easy to forget how much work is being done by learning here, especially during those early “slow” levels. They even make it feel fun, like… learning a language is some sort of game. How dare they!
But that’s a good reminder that the overwhelming feeling is something to look out for. Getting buried in WK reviews really sucks and it takes a while for them to even out even after dropping the intake of new items. Once I get closer to my old level I’m definitely dropping down to 10 or so lessons/day just to keep things consistent, but easier.
Maybe take into consideration what kind of lessons you have been given when deciding whether to do 20 or not. For instance if they are radicals then you know you can do another lesson, if they are kanji based on ones that you already know (similar meaning, same reading, etc) and therefore less to remember then maybe do another lesson.
Just sticking to “I’m going to do 20” might be too much at times because the lessons aren’t a consistent “difficulty”.
That’s my take, but I’m just a level 4 scrub that’s probably going way too slow.
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