Currently, I stick with 10 new vocab words a day, and once I burn through my level’s vocab, I speed through the radicals of the new level and do 5 kanji a day, eventually finishing the kanji, and repeating the 10 vocab a day till the level is complete. I find that vocab tends to be harder to remember than kanji, but I really want to increase the amount of vocab I do, more so because I see people leveling up quicker by doing 15-20 a day. My goal is to reach level 60 in 2 years or less, but at the pace I’m going at, it seems more like 3-3.5 years. Is it worth doing more vocab, even if I may forget things more, just for the sake of reaching my goal?
Ultimately only you can answer that question.
If you use any scripts or are willing to install them, I would suggest moving vocabulary lessons closer to the day you unlock them, that helps me a lot with learning them since their kanji will be the freshest in my mind. This could be done with Lesson Filter script that lets you pick how many radical, kanji and vocabulary lessons you want (so you could start vocabulary earlier if you want). I’m sure there are other scripts that could do something similar, but I don’t know them.
I found early on that kanji were easier to learn than vocabulary, but as I got to higher levels, like mid-teens to early twenties, that shifted so vocabulary became easier.
You could always try doing a few more vocabulary lessons each day for a couple of weeks and see how that feels. You could change your lessons batch size to say 6 (in settings), and start doing 2 sets of those (aka 12) vocabulary lessons each day, and then return the batch size to 5 when you start doing kanji again.
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Ooo this is very useful information, thanks a bunch!
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Just started at the beginning of the year and I’m also struggling a bit to find the ideal pace.
Currently, I’m doing five Kanji per day and I had a few days in between where I was just doing reviews.
I’m trying not to rush too much even though I’d like to try a faster pace once I feel more at home with my learning routine.
I also installed the lesson filter script just to give me some flexibility if I want to mix in some vocabulary lessons between the new Kanji.
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One thing you should ask yourself, is what comes after level 60? Speeding will definitely make you forget things, so ultimately is it really worth it? It all depends on what you do after. You need to be prepared to keep going to avoid forgetting. What does level 60 actually mean for you? It’s not going to automatically make you better at Japanese.
Just do what feels comfortable for you and what you can handle is my advice.
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I say my goal is level 60 because it’s a numerical, tangible, short-term goal that boosts my productivity. Obviously the ultimate goal would be fluency, but that’s something I know will come with years of diligent studying, so for now I make my goals something that’s within reach since it’s more of a stepping stone than a long-term goal. I’ll most likely experiment with the amount of vocab I’m piling on, then take note of the amount of words I recall vs before increasing my study amount, just to see if I’m getting too ahead of myself 
Be aware that the review load will get a LOT heavier as you progress, because you’ll have Master and Enlightened reviews coming back on top of the new stuff. What seems like a good plan at level 7 may turn out to be overwhelming by level 15 or 20.
So whatever you do now, be prepared to adjust as circumstances warrant.
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Gotcha, I’ll be sure to keep this in mind