After doing somewhat poorly in my most recent burn reviews, the number of my apprentice items have gone over 200, and I think that number might only increase if I continue to miss other burn items in the coming weeks. Usually I keep my apprentice items at about 180 at the start of a level and bring it back down to about 80 once I level up, but now that I’m over 200 I think I’ll be slowing down on the lessons til I can get back to a more manageable size.
I’m curious about what others think is a good upper limit so that you don’t feel too overwhelmed, while still keeping a steady pace with lessons.
from my experience, you need to question why you had all these mistakes:
mentally tired? it has an impact on memory, maybe you need to address this before taking more lessons.
bad learning methods ? maybe your learning techniques cannot keep up with the increasing complexity of the kanji. You may want to look at phono-semantic analysis to retain how kanjis are composed, to have stronger grounds for the memorization process.
Seconded. 150 - 160 is my limit to give space for the upcoming guru items that I might have forgotten during the past two weeks. It’s what kept me alive during fast levels
unlike someone.
and you were the one scolding me about my lessons during fast levels! \ /
Until this sentence I thought I was qualified to reply😅. I have never been consistent with my lessons😂. But I have noticed that when I let apprentice get up to 150 area I get overwhelmed and motivation drops. So usually I try to keep it under/around 100. Upper limit 125 maybe? As I said, I have never been consistent.
I’m currently taking things Extremely Easy and my natural limit seems to be 10 apprentice items, which includes leeches. every now and then I’ll do a lesson of another 3 items and wait them out. It still leaves me with an average of about ~40 items to review a day.
ETA: at my max (and after 2 resets), I never went above 109 apprentices, and I rarely had that pile over 100 (maybe 6 days in a whole year?).
I wouldn’t say I was the most consistent in the earlier levels but I did try to keep my apprentice level at 100 or if I felt I was doing ok with the kanji/vocab on that level I would go up to 120.
So far I’ve never felt overwhelmed at these numbers. Even when life has been busy and I haven’t had a chance to do all my daily reviews before the end of the day the amount of reviews the next day has still been manageable.
Thank you for the advice! I do think it’s becoming harder for me to cope because as I level up, I’m seeing less and less familiar kanji. I’m now in completely unknown territory and it’s harder to keep up!
Thanks to everyone who’s replied so far. Sorry I don’t have the time to get back to everyone individually! I’ve been wondering how to rearrange my study habits here on WaniKani so that I don’t end in a situation like this again.
I think from now on I’ll try to keep my apprentice items at around 120 with an upper limit at 150, where I won’t do anymore new lessons until I manage to get it back down.
The longer I’m on WaniKani the more I feel like I’m playing a strategic game haha