It’s not extreme at all, most people are trying to learn ~2136 kanji at the same time (I know I am, I just don’t have them all put in an SRS yet).
No one is saying you’re putting 1000 items into a SRS at the same time (WK doesn’t even let you do more than about 100 unless you fudge the lesson ordering). But having several thousand active items over your SRS system is pretty much exactly the point of the system.
I have just over 3000 unburned items on WK at the minute, if I stopped doing my reviews for a few months I would eventually all of them build up into one massive review pile. (and I’m only got at a moderate pace, there’s people doing this a LOT faster than me)
It might be worth rereading the guide Tofugo made for WK and it might clear up any issues you have with SRSs
I currently have 400 “unburned” and I do about a lesson a day. You are suggesting that people are doing several lessons every day, and somehow keeping up with the reviews. That seems like too much to me, but thanks for the condescending reply.
Everyone can go to the pace they see fit, but 400 items seem an extremely low number for an SRS like Wanikani. Most people probably have more than a 1000. I have less currently, but I am going at an extremely slow pace after a very long break and prioritising other aspects of language learning.
I have about 900 items currently active but that is quite low because I typically only learn 5 new items per weekday, so thats only 25 new items a week (assuming I dont have a day where I decide not to do a new lesson). I would say its pretty easy to have 1000+ items in the SRS.
a) kanji make up less than a third of the items in WK, so make that 300 kanji.
b) some people finish WK in just under a year. with perfect accuracy (which they don’t have) they’d have about 4500 unburned items at the end of that year (the other half would be burned). it’s not for everybody, but certainly possible.
c) if you want to finish WK in a very reasonable 2 years, with an accuracy somewhere in the upper 80ties, you’d have at any time something like 3000 unburned items. these are very normal numbers to have.
d) unplanned changes in the circumstances of one’s life happen, it’s very easy to go from having 2 or 3 hours a day which one can dedicate to learning japanese to having no time at all.
There are some user scripts that do reordering, you can just look them up on google by searching “reorder user script wanikani” or something like that. Or if you want to do it on mobile, Flaming Durtles on Android and Tsurukume on iOS can help with that.
