Wanikani: How many items do you keep in apprentice, guru, and master as to not get overwhelmed with reviews?

3 comments

1. After the initial lesson, each item is reviewed 8 times. So if you stay consistent, over time your number of reviews per day will be around 8 times your number of lessons per day (or slightly more if you get a lot of reviews wrong).

   Max speed is a level a week, so about 25 lessons and 200 reviews a day. If you’re going for 2-3 weeks per level, you could do 10 lessons per day and have about 80 reviews per day.

2. I stopped leveling up for a couple weeks because I needed a break. I’m currently on level 21. Going at a pace of every two weeks or so to level keeps you at about 100-150 reviews per day. I try to check them every couple hours or so when I’m at work and before bed so that I don’t have to do more than 50 at a time. (I sometimes don’t do that though and end up with 70-80 at one time which feels like it takes forever)

3. I think the common advice to have ~100 items at the apprentice stage. I feel the other stages will depend on your review accuracy, but should be in higher counts than the lower stages.

   That being said, I reached level 60 in WaniKani a few years ago, and I did that in ~16 months, which resulted in having ~200 apprentice stage items typically but ~300 apprentice stage items at the peak (it increased by ~2 per level, iirc). Currently, I’m going through WaniKani again purely for the sentence reading practice at an extremely leisurely pace, so I level up every ~50 days, which means I have ~15 items at apprentice stage per day.

   Edit: On a related note, I think that if you have more Guru items than Master, this is a very strong signal that you should slow down. More common advice is that you should aim for 90%+ accuracy (you can check this at wkstats.com). I think my first time through my accuracy dipped to like ~83%, and this time through it’s at like ~98%.