I got pretty sick for a few weeks and now I have 300 reviews. I’ve gone through about half of them but somehow my brain turned to cheese in the interval and I’m missing a lot of them. I feel like I’m just going to be churning through the same bundle forever. Do you just keep doing your lessons, racking up a bigger and bigger load each day in hopes that it will break into your brain? Or do you just try to digest what you have?
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Chunk up and pause lessons until it levels out.
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As a serial procrastinator, I’ve been there, so many times. The best strat is to stop taking new lessons until you feel like you’re ready for them. Fall down 7 times, get up 8: 七転び八起き.
I took a nearly 3 year break at one point, 808 days… Then several more huge gaps. Don’t stress it. It happens
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My computer went down several times over the middle of the year. I also had a huge load of reviews to do. I did no new lesson at all, and just finished up everything last night. It did take a while, but by seeing the reviews over and over again, I have really learned them. I’m ready to start new lessons now, but not too many for a while.
You can do it. You will likely cuss reviews more than once, but you can get through it. It will take time, but what a celebration when you get caught up!
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If you get any right, it’s a smaller and smaller bundle. Sooner or later you will get it back to normal. Stop doing more lessons, get that review number down, start lessons again.
Don’t worry, it happens to all of us sometimes. (I had 2700 once)
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I havent been dumpstered yet, but I have been crushed under the never ending pile of cards. Doing things in blocks helps tremendously and also using super study quiz script has kept me from getting crushed again so far.
Its quite demoralizing to get 90 done just to see zero progress because a ton just released again. But just keep chugging studying and don’t be afraid to hit the pause button on lessons.
I had to hit pause on lessons when I tried to do WK on my business trip and I just could not focus. I even wanted to do WK on the plane to and from and also the focus just did not happen. Focusing properly is required to get good performance or I will just fail miserably.
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As someone who…let some pile up…My best advice.
Power through the reviews. get them down to your daily manageable, then start lessons again. Took me a month, but I also had several YEARS of time for stuff to slosh out the brain, so it was harder.
So just patience and being as steady as you can.
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As with many things in life, the biggest tasks are best broken down into small, digestible portions.
Do like 20-30 at a time and come back to it 15 minutes later or something. Even taking a small breather really helps the brain from turning to mush.
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FWIW, this is exactly the reason why I made my own app client Gakugame (renamed it from Relay Cards just now, seemed more fun) for Wani Kani. Gakugame - WaniKani Companion App - App Store
I hope you don’t mind the self promotion but I genuinely made it (free) to help for this kind of thing so thought I’d share. It has 2 key features to help with this situation (which I found myself in many times)
- daily review limits - set a goal of something like 50 per day or whatever you can do and make steady progress through the dumpster pile with at least some kind of sense of completion each day
- multiple choice and hints - I know, typing is best for your memory, but sometimes any progress is better than no progress, (or better than simply cheating to get through reviews with a dictionary open in another tab) so with multiple choice you can jog your memory and get through the pile, and then turn it off when you’re ready
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I was recently in a very similar situation, and I tried to power through without pausing on new lessons. It was a mistake. The reviews just kept piling up. I finally had to stop new lessons when my review pile hit 800. Now I’ve been stuck at the same level for a couple of months as I try to dig out from all the Master and Enlightened reviews that ended up back in my Guru stack. Do yourself a favor and pause on new lessons now. That will get you back on track faster than if you try to push through.
Missing a bunch of reviews is painful, but just keep doing them and trust the process. You’ll start to remember them again as you keep going.
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300 isn’t too bad! Commit to like 50 reviews everyday and you’ll be through that pile in a week.
Regarding the items that never seem to get vanquished, I keep a Google Docs spreadsheet of leeches where I write whether it’s the meaning and/or reading that’s tripping me up, and a revised mnemonic for dealing with the tricky item. Some extra time spent on your leech battleplans will go a long way.
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I was in a sort of similar situation. Like everyone else says, pause lessons get the review stack down to normal. Then rev back up into your routine. Here’s a graph that tracks the number of items I have in each level every day. That perfectly flat spot in the middle is when I went to Japan for 2 weeks and set WaniKani to vacation mode. See that spike in guru (purple) right after it? I’d lost my routine, and forgotten so many kanji in 2 weeks that a lot of master and enlightened went down to guru. The next ~month was rough recovering that progress but I got through it. You will too. Take your foot off the gas (new lessons) and catch back up. Don’t do your whole backlog at once either. Otherwise it will all come back at once in a week, 2 weeks or a month.
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I think the best thing to do – is to start moving again ASAP. If you have the willpower to do it without reset – great. But if you don’t feel like it – then it’s better to do a reset (not necessarily to level 1, but to the level you feel comfortable about) – and start moving again, than to keep trying to muster the willpower.
Another way is, as you have pointed out, to stop doing lessons until you get your reviews to normal. It’s perfectly ok to slow down your pace, as long as it’s not to 0. Do a little bit every day – on some days you’d be able to do more and on some days – not as much, but the importan thing is to keep studying every day.
Anyway, best of luck with your studies! 
We are all rooting for you! 
P. S.
Well said!
Reminds me of
Which I would roughly translate as
– It’s over, Denken.
– I too no longer have enough magic power left for my High-Speed Movement magic…
– Richter, Raofen. In such a situation what do you think a Royal Court wizard like me would do? Struggle – unattractivly, unpleasantly – until the very end.
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just do 3 batches a day and you will keep up. That’s nothing compared to later levels.
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I was thrown by Richter being called リヒター… I thought it was slang for a microwave at first, reheater…
Also for some reason I always assumed that ugly was 見に難い, not it’s own word: 醜い!
I really need to read more…
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I have thought about whether that etymology too, but actually slightly off.
【醜いの語源・由来】
醜いは「見憎い」とも書くように、語構成は「み（見）」＋「にくし（憎し）」で、「見る気持ちがしない」「見るのが嫌だ」という意味。
For reheater, it might has to be long heat = リヒータ or リヒーター (repeater is in the IME). Dunno about possibility of slang 
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If you have a lot of free time, just do all of them within 2 hours then review all mistakes twice
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