New People Questions! ~~~<3 [Lost?! Confused?! We're here to help!]

Welcome to WaniKani!

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is there any way to speed up the SRS process :C

No, it’s the same for everyone.

What does the color next to someone’s avatar mean?

Also I haven’t interacted in a forum since 2005, do people still say avatar??

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gray - not subscribed
light blue - recurring subscription
purple - lifetime subscription
gold - level 60
pink - staff

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Thank you!

Some do, though in most cases it’s an incorrect usage.

‘Avatar’ actually comes from the concept of incarnation/embodiment, which isn’t what a profile pic is in most cases. If you intend the character in your profile pic to be a virtual embodiment of yourself (e.g. if I were pretending to be the black cat in my profile pic), then it would rightly be called an avatar. Otherwise, it’s just a “profile pic”.

(As for myself, I do occasionally post as if I were a black cat, but mostly out of humor, or to deflect from giving out personally identifying info, like in the [post a photo of yourself] thread.)

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Ha! That was a great post :laughing: I originally put a picture of myself for my profile pic but noticed most people don’t :sweat_smile: My picture is a face swap of Esmeralda and Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Thanks for the explanation!

Hi everyone! I’m going to Japan in a month!

I started a bit late but I finally learned all of my hiragana and katakana, and now I’m learning the radicals on here.

It’s never too late. Welcome to the madhouse!

Hope you have great time in Japan !

Did anyone else suck at their guru-level SRS reviews at the start?

Just did a review for some of level two and I think I got ~70% correct and had a LOT of trouble remembering mnemonics.

I wouldn’t worry too much about that. The first thing to keep in mind is after you get to guru level 2 or so, you probably won’t really need the mnemonics for the particular item anymore. If you aren’t quite that far yet in the items you’re missing, you can also make up your own mnemonics that might stick better (put them in the meaning and or reading notes section for the item you’re missing a lot).

The second thing to keep in mind is missing things is what the SRS is all about. You’re struggling with something, it’ll keep showing up often in your reviews until you it sticks. Over time you’ll get better at recalling things and you won’t miss as much. Even with reviews of over 100 items, I average 80%-90% correct answers at this point; 70% is definitely not bad at all.

Extra note: You might want to do separate review of the day and thing counters (一つ, 七つ, 六日, etc.), as they don’t really follow a pattern. They were, by far, my biggest issue, and they still cause me problems even though I have them pretty much guru’ed.

I’ll try and keep all that in mind, and not be discouraged, thanks for the response :slight_smile:

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I completed all of my lessons one day ago. How often do we normally get new lessons to learn in WaniKani?

When you have reviewed an item 4 times (with no mistakes*) it will reach “guru” level, and any associated lessons will be unlocked. For radicals, this means that kanji will be unlocked. For kanji, vocab are unlocked.

So complete your radical reviews as they appear and in a couple days they will reach guru. The start is slow but ramps up to a quite aggressive pace.

*mistakes won’t erase all your progress, just some of it

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Thanks for clarifying!

Im trying to complete the new person checklist by saying “hello!” I hope this works!

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You may have found that it didn’t affect the checklist. Since they migrated the forums about a year ago, they are no longer programmatically linked to the checklist.

But welcome :slight_smile:

what exactly are radicals?