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

what does it mean for a kanji / word to be “burned”? people seem to celebrate it as a good thing but I don’t know what it means or how to get there

It means that you’ve gotten an item correct so many times it will have reached the last stage, and you will have “burned” it into your memory. The item won’t appear in your reviews again.

(It is possible to resurrect burned items if you want to review it again, it will go back to apprentice stage.)

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@Redglare handled the meaning on WaniKani, but I figured I would mention that it’s also a reference to the history of kanji. The oldest written evidence of kanji comes from turtle shells that had the kanji burned into them, for use in fortune telling. This also relates to the turtle motif of the site.

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Thanks, it’s just the little quirks that take getting used to. I expected kanji to only unlock after my radicals gurued. To get some and not others I was like “is this a bug?” :smile:

But no, as usual it’s a feature haha.

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Your radicals didn’t get to guru yet? Or is it just that the new level already has some kanji from the off?

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Nope, none of the level 2 radicals had been gurued. Like you said, they were there from the off - those few level 2 kanji unlocked at the same time the level 2 radicals unlocked. Now that I’ve gurued most radicals, all but two have now unlocked (and those that are still locked look like the radicals I got wrong last review (heaven vs king, and sword vs power :sweat:)

I read all the things I was meant to before starting and still, all of my assumptions about how the wanikani system works are getting shook up lol. Ah well, best to run into these things now and learn how it all happens.

The way I thought it would work is if I got a certain percent (90%?) of radicals gurued, that all that level kanji would unlock at once.

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Yeah, you probably understand now, but each radical is just directly tied to kanji which use it. And kanji are just directly tied to vocab that use them.

Some stuff is just gated off into later levels to smooth out the journey, which is why leveling up unleashes a torrent of other stuff too.

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Yeah I think I’m getting the hang of it… so what happens if I guru all the kanji I have so far unlocked, but those final two take another week hypothetically. When does level 3 unlock?

Maybe I’m approaching this differently than others, but I’d like to be able to do projections over a few weeks, so that I can know what to expect on different days.

You need to guru 90% or more of the kanji for a given level to level up… Whatever that works out to. If you hit 90% and level up, it doesn’t matter what the status of any other kanji from that level is.

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Ah ok, that’s where I got that “90%” figure from then. I get ya :slightly_smiling_face: It’s starting to click.

It really seems like there are compounding losses from getting radicals wrong, so I will try my hardest not to :laughing:

Thanks so much for explaining things!!

I’m so sorry…people have obviously asked this before…but I’ve searched my Account page from Settings (yes, I went to the actual website, not from forums) and still can’t find where to get my API key. I also tried searching ‘Public API’ from Command+F (on a Mac) and it didn’t work. Where do I find it??

Click on your profile pic and a menu will open :slight_smile: Then you just need to click on “API tokens”.

If the list is empty, then you can generate an API token:

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So many people post their average number of days spent on a level. Is this something that is built into the system (if so, where?), or do we need a script? Thank you!

There is wkstats.com where you can find all sorts of information on your progress. You need an API Key, of course, but it’s not a script. Check out the post before yours, if you want to know where to find your API Key.

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Hiya! I’ve had a question that’s been on my mind for a few days. Should I, at this time, be memorizing what words are transitive verbs, godan verbs, etc. while I’m studying WaniKani?

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It will all come into play when you study grammar. It’s good to be aware of the different categories, but I wouldn’t expend too much energy on it. That said, I do have trouble with some transitive pairs, so try to at least pay a little attention :sweat_smile:

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Sometimes I wish WK would distinguish better between transitive/intransitive pairs in its translations, so that you’d have to enter “to stop something” for 止める rather than being able to just enter “to stop”. Then again, that could get annoying as well :slight_smile:

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It’s annoying that they do it for some, but not for others. So you forget which ones require it, and which don’t.

I’m thinking I’ll just add transitive/intransitive as a custom synonym for my most troublesome pairs.

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Yeah, I guess one workaround there is user synonyms, I did that for some of them, but not ideal

edit: oops I either missed your last line or I missed your edit :slight_smile:

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Edited right as you posted :stuck_out_tongue:

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