I've decided to open this thread hoping to get your opinion on something that has been bothering me a lot lately.

Today after finishing all my reviews both here on kanji-koohii (~100-150 since I finished RTK1 yesterday) and on anki (~2750) I made a few calculations and realized that everyday I end up spending about 3 hours just reviewing flashcards (kanji from RTK, kanji combinations, vocabulary, grammar).

As a result I find that I am spending a lot more time reviewing than practicing and learning new things, for example I could be putting more time into doing reading and listening exercises. However I fear that by limiting my reviews, especially those related to the vocabulary which take me roughly 70 minutes to go through, I would end up looking up every word I find in those readings.
On the other hand, I was doing a simple reading today (N4/N3 level) and I found myself constantly surprised at how the words were put together (which is something I don't get to see when reviewing through anki) and while I did understand the meaning of the sentences, I also realized that I would never be able to come up with such sentences on my own, which honestly worries me a lot.

I would love to immerse myself more in the language, but I'm afraid of moving too fast and forgetting even faster. Do you have any suggestions? How did you deal with the vocabulary?

Well I pretty much only use native materials now. Reviewing gets incredibly boring after a couple years. I found subs2srs was great at boot strapping myself into native material

rikaichan also works really good to boot strap yourself into native reading as well. No dictionary needed!

I see no reason to ever stop using Anki, the reviews will get faster and you'll stop adding as much as time goes on. I've been learning for 2.5 years and so far I have 22.5k vocabulary cards consisting of 3100+ kanji. I will keep adding as long as I keep reading. I don't add everything of course, only things that seem like I wouldn't remember if I didn't see it again for a month.

It sounds like you have added material to anki at a rate that outpaces what you can handle. I would say take a few weeks and just review in anki without adding anything new. This will help your reviews settle down to a more reasonable level. I personally don't like spending more than about 30 minutes a day in anki. Just set yourself either a target number of cards or time limit that you want to get down to. Then once your reviews are consistently below that limit, start adding new cards again. Make sure that you limit the number of new cards that you add per day.
I find that 10 new cards per day leads me to about 100 reviews per day in the long run.

Then in the meantime, try practicing and enjoying some native materials that are on your level. Don't worry about adding anything new right now, even if it seems like a word that you really need to know. I promise you will see it again at some point in the future if it really is an important word. Or at the very least, you can add some new cards to anki, but limit your new cards per day to 0 until you get your reviews under control.

While it's important to have a big vocabulary, its also important to have a good mastery of a small vocabulary. Knowing 2000 words really well, will probably take you farther than knowing 10,000 words half-heartedly.

Thanks a lot for all your replies

@juniperpansy: I downloaded rikaichan and it's very helpful! Thanks a lot

@vtx4848: I checked again today and you are absolutely right my review count (despite the new cards I added today) has already dropped by roughly ~100 flashcards

@Zarxrax: I think you're right about me adding too many cards, lately I was adding from 50 to 80 new cards per day, so in the next few days I will look at how quickly my reviews decrease in order to come up with a more appropriate daily amount. I'm also going to pay more attention to the cards I add as you suggested, it's just that being a novice no matter what I read I always end up with a ton of words that I do not know, but from now on I'll try to add only those that really seem important.