MaruMori.io & Kitsun.io - [ANNIVERSARY SALE IS LIVE - UPDATE: SIMILAR KANJI MINIGAME & NEW N2 & N3 JLPT MOCK EXAMS - COMMUNITY STUDY LISTS (sharing study lists)] - Grammar SRS, Grammar Lessons, Reading Exercises, Vocabulary, Kanji and more!

[jesseberezan]

H y p e.

[neicul]

N3 Content Drop

The time has come for us to release another content batch into the wild. Five new grammar lessons, a reading, and an unlock batch await any adventurers brave enough to seek them out.

This week’s grammar points include ～代わりに (do X instead of Y why don’t you?), sentence enders っけ, わ, ぜ (for all your sentence ending needs!), as well as せっかく (what exactly does this mean???).

Also, in this batch’s reading, get some practice for if you ever need to go to a pharmacy in Japan , check in with everyone’s favorite assistant to the sectional manager , and get some book recommendations from Velociraptor Steve .

As a reminder, grammar SRS now releases along with each lesson, so you can get started grinding out your grammar mastery right away!

Happy studies!

[neicul]

Features Update: Grammar SRS Sentence Audio, (Adaptive) SRS Furigana, Prestige Markers and more!

Today we’ll be rounding up a few of the latest development updates again! These new features and fixes went live a little while ago, so you might have already encountered them! (Or in the case of bugfixes, hopefully, you didn’t notice a thing afterward, other than it working correctly ).

Let’s get started!

Grammar SRS Sentence Audio

We’ve added audio for all questions/sentences! This audio will autoplay when you get to the backside of the lesson quiz or review. We hope that this further reinforces what the correct answer is. One small note: If you use lightning mode to skip the backside (when correct), it will skip the audio autoplay, as otherwise, it would play the previous sentence’s audio while you are trying to focus on the new sentence/question.

Grammar SRS (Adaptive) Furigana Settings

We’ve added furigana to the Unscramble type Grammar SRS layouts! But that’s not all as we’re also giving you control over when furigana should be displayed through two new settings:

• Always
• Only unknown vocabulary (Adaptive).
• Never

If you choose the adaptive option, another setting will pop up which will let you choose the minimum SRS level before a word is considered as known. This means you get fine-grained control over when something should display furigana or not.

Here’s an example:

In the above picture, I’ve set the furigana setting to adapative and put it at SRS level 5. MM now knows that you “know” 山 already (SRS level 5 or higher), while 歩いた displays furigana as 歩く either hasn’t been learned yet or is below level 5.

In general we try to not give you any unknown words for Grammar SRS as long as you keep up with the vocab/kanji unlocks from the main course, but there are a few needed exceptions here and there. So we hope that this setting helps you all parse sentences more easily!

You can find this setting on the global settings page.

SRS Audio AutoPlay Setting

You can now enable or disable Audio autoplay for SRS Lessons and Reviews (both vocab/kanji and grammar at once). You can find this setting on the global settings page.

Prestige Markers

Recently, one of our most active users reached level 100 on MaruMori. That means their level got reset back to level 1, but they now have a cool prestige marker (and a new title) on their avatar to indicate how much work they put in. Congratulations Rebecca! (Also, how are you level 23 again already???)

Other fun stuff!

• Home - SRS Rank Bars - Now always shows a tooltip when hovering over one of the bars.

• Home - SRS Rank Bars - Now has a separate bar for Grammar items.

• Home - Now shows how many kanji and vocabulary you learned as statistics.

• Study Lists - Added a premade Joyo kanji Study List!

• Study Lists - Added pictures to all JLPT Study Lists to help differentiate them.

Bugfixes

• Example Sentences - Fixed an issue with duplicate furigana showing up.

• Dictionary - Fixed an issue where the add buttons would get hidden behind the vocabulary blocks on some resolutions.

• Quick Study - Now updates the progress bar per completed review, rather than having to complete all of a single item’s reviews for it to progress a bit.

• Study Streak Saver - Fixed an issue where it wouldn’t properly find a gap to restore in certain cases.

• Adventure - Fixed an issue with the pointer having a weird offset on the level tiles.

• Dictionary - Now properly trims your search again.

[whinette]

When do you think you’ll finish the batch of n3 and begin n2?
Also, ETA for apps / pwa?

[neicul]

On Tuesday we release batch #6 of N3. Our estimates are around 36 batches total for N3 and we currently release 1 new batch consisting of 5 grammar lessons, 1 reading exercise, 1 unlocks batch (~10 kanji with stories/vocab) and corresponding grammar SRS homework per two weeks.

So that’d bring us to May 2025. However, now that our content workload dropped a whole bunch since we caught up with Grammar SRS, we’re going to try and increase our release speed to once a week or similar as soon as we have built up a bit of a buffer So that could potentially cut the time in half, bringing us to October/November 2024.

As for the mobile apps, I’ve started on designing some screens, but other features/projects are currently taking a bit of priority. Ideally I’d want the API and backend structure to be mature before committing to publishing an app (meaning that I want most platform features to be out there and stable), as it’s a lot easier and faster to update a website for breaking changes than it is to update apps. That said, I know a lot of users are waiting on apps, and I personally also really like having a dedicated app, so it’s definitely high on the priority list. Hoping to get at least a beta out within the next 6 months orso

[neicul]

N3 Content Drop

D-d-d-drop it like it’s hot! A hot (grammatical) potato! And my goodness if this isn’t the most delicious potato you’ve ever tasted. With flavor notes such as ～まま・～っぱなし that allow you to savor things “as is”, ～くせに which allows you to judge, criticize, or make fun of things, and ～せい, because surely someone’s to blame for how beautiful you are, (your username goes here)… it’s simply not fair.

And don’t think for one second that this batch’s reading exercise is anything less than the most bestest way to review all of your recent grammar, vocabulary, and more. Did you know that Mike is a Tyler Swift fan? Neither did we!!! 🫨

Stay classy, study like an elegant tortoise, and keep on being awesome, MMers.

---

P.S. This message was brought to you by Jesse

[neicul]

N3 Content Drop

A happy Tuesday to all!

I come to you with glorious news: another batch of N3 content is ready for you to enjoy! Have you ever wondered how to use 「まさか」 properly? Or maybe that pesky adverb 「わざわざ」! I know I personally always struggled with what 「同士」 actually meant… All of that and more in this batch’s grammar lessons!

Then, practice all of your new vocab and grammar with our newest reading exercise: The Cinnamon Roll Thief​:ninja: , Cars , and “Omikuji”. An important read if you ever want to get your fortune from a shrine in Japan!

That’s all for now, happy studies, and wishing you a springful spring season!

[MinaCaesar]

By the way. Any news on the android app? My phone craves it

[SpiderWeb]

I’ve been using the site for a little while now, just started the srs features a couple days ago, so I’m wondering if there’s a way to import vocabulary known from wanikani into marumori so that I’m not seeing the really simple words and words I’ve already covered here. I Think I’ve seen a way to set an items level but I don’t know if there’s a way to do that all at once or not. I like what the site has so far and I’m looking forward to getting good enough to read the n2 and n1 stuff once it’s added.

[neicul]

My phone craves it too haha! Luckily the mobile version of the website works fine for now (imo)

As for the mobile apps, no real update yet other than that I’m going to try and release a beta in the coming 6 months. We have a few other projects running that still get prio over the apps at the moment. Mainly because we want to stabilise the backend before building a mobile app on top of it.

[neicul]

You can import known vocabulary and kanji through our import tool (over at study tools in the resources submenu). Importing as known will suspend those items, meaning they will not show up in your lessons or reviews until you unsuspend them.

We (intentionally) currently have no way of importing or setting items at a certain level, because it would impact your stats and achievement unlocks if we allowed that. We prefer those to be an accurate representation of what you’ve learned on MaruMori

[neicul]

The MM easter egg hunt is on!

Eggs? Scattered all over the Islands?

How did they get there? Who hid them? Was it Maru??? The truth is… no one knows the origin of these mysterious eggs. But one thing that is certain is that you can net yourself a shiny achievement for finding all of them!

This is a limited-time event, so don’t dilly-dally! Search through all current regions and get your Easter egg hunt on! For convenience, we’ve added a small counter at the bottom so you know how many you have left to find (for each region)! Good luck!

Happy Easter from all of us on the MM team! We’re very proud of our community, and we hope everyone had a nice long weekend!

[neicul]

It’s been two weeks already? (N3 content drop)

It’s true, your eyes do not deceive you! It’s time for a fresh batch of N3 content! Definitely don’t skip out on this one, as we’ve got such grammatical gems as ～わざと (on purpose), どうしても (no matter what), and ～とおり, so that you can finally say “All according to my keikaku” (in Japanese).

And as always, we have a new set of unlocks, and a reading exercise to test your knowledge of the previous batch. (I hope you’ve been drilling 衣服…)

I’ve been getting lots of people writing in asking about Bob, and the aftermath of him eating Shiori’s cinnamon rolls, so I’m happy to say that this week’s batch features a follow-up of that disastrous evening.

With this batch, we’ve already released 40 N3 grammar lessons (59 levels)! Can you believe it? Soon we’ll be at 50, and then 100, and then before you know it, it will be time to venture into the Sands of Mastery…

All of us on the MaruMori team hope that you’re having a fantastic start to the spring season and, as always, happy studies! :marumori:

[neicul]

Certainly! If you click on “ignore” or press the ESC key it will let you redo your answer. Is that what you were looking for?

[neicul]

Satori Reader Sync and Collaboration!

Hi everyone!

I’m glad to announce a feature that has been available for a little while now but has not officially been announced just yet.

We’re excited to announce that we’re collaborating with Satori Reader to make it easy for users to use both platforms in tandem. (P.S. There’s an ongoing sale, more on that below!)

What exactly is Satori Reader?

For those unaware of what exactly Satori Reader is, the easiest way to describe it is that they are a platform that offers (many fun) stories for you to learn Japanese with. These stories range from easy to difficult and are typically used to gradually get you into reading “real” native Japanese content. They make the transition into native materials a lot easier by interactively providing vocabulary and grammar notes in their stories, so there’s always a guiding hand to help you on the way.

Here’s a (random) example story:

As you can imagine, these stories are perfect as a supplement to the learning material available on MaruMori!

Introducing the Satori Reader Sync

So to make things easier for users of both platforms, we now let you set up an automatic sync of your learned Kanji on MM.

This sync makes it so that furigana of the kanji you know, will not show up in Satori Reader’s stories. Adaptive furigana like this has a lot of benefits when learning to read Japanese content! At some point in your Japanese learning journey, you will find out that most “real” textual content aimed at adults, has little to no furigana at all. This means that you will have to know how to read a certain word just by knowing the kanji version of it. Hiding the furigana in the SR stories will make that transition to furigana-less texts much easier for you.

To make things even more simple, the sync automatically syncs your known kanji in MM every 12 hours. So you can set it up once and never have to touch it again.

We also give you fine control over which Kanji should be synced by letting you set a minimum SRS level for the sync. For example, you might feel like only SRS level 5 and above should be considered as known for the sync, or perhaps you want only the Mastered Kanji (level 9) to be marked as such.

Awesome! So how do I set this up?

You can set up the sync by going to the Settings page, copying your MM Public API token, and putting that into the MaruMori section on the custom kanji import page over at Satori Reader.

Once you’ve pasted your API Key, all that’s left to do is to set the minimum SRS level, and hit the import button. Yay! Your sync is now set up!

One quick note: This is a MaruMori Plus feature only, which means only users with an active subscription or a Lifetime account can make use of it.

Did someone mention a sale?

Coincidentally, Satori Reader is currently holding their spring sale! This is a limited-time sale, so what better time to hop on than now? But just in case you missed the sale, the people over at Satori Reader were kind enough to provide us with a coupon code for MaruMori users that has no expiration time. You can find this coupon by hovering over the question mark icon under account links

Some last words

We’re really happy to put this new feature out there and make things more convenient for our users and provide a way to improve your studies even further. You might have suspected it already too, but this also means that our Public API is now in beta (more on that soon, but if you want in early, come join our Discord!) We’d like to thank Satori Reader for their willingness to collaborate with us and for generally being a great platform with lovely team members. We hope you will consider supporting their work as well!

[neicul]

N3 Content Drop (it like it’s hot)

I am positively pleased to announce that there is another fresh batch of N3 content out for you to enjoy, explore, and drill to mastery!

It may be a day late (this was posted elsewhere earlier , I forgot to post it here), but I promise this is for good reasons, and nothing at all like Maru having once again “accidentally” used the company credit card to buy “bamboo” online.

In this batch of content, learn how to pretend in Japanese with ふりをする, say that something depends on someone using 次第, and tackle one of the most controversial compound verb makers of all time: ～込む.

Plus, we’ve got another installment of our cultural series for you in this week’s reading exercise, and this time, our topic is “baths”! Trust me, there’s nothing boring about Japanese baths. Just wait until you hear some of these fancy functions…

All of this and more in the most current batch of content uncovered in the Jungle of Tenacity! Let’s go!

Happy studies

[neicul]

Main Study List Rework! Unlocks now work a bit differently!

Hey all! Hope your studies are going well!

As you might have noticed, this week we had a day with extended maintenance on MaruMori. This maintenance was needed in order to deploy a very large rework of how everyone’s Main Study Lists work.

Remind me, what are the Main Study Lists again?

The Main Study Lists are the lists that fill up as you progress through the regions in Adventure. When you unlock new vocabulary and kanji, these items go into your Main Kanji & Vocabulary Study List. When you complete Grammar Lessons, the Grammar SRS homework items get added to your Main Grammar Study List.

(P.s.: we added some new artwork while at it!)

Okay cool! So what exactly changed then?

Good question! The answer is a little bit technical, as we had to change a lot on the backend side of things (hence the maintenance). But to explain it simply: Everyone is now using the same lists, rather than personal lists. This means that we can easily make changes to the main lists now, without having to blow up the server to sync the changes to everyone’s personal main lists.

Now you might be wondering if this changes anything for your studies? Typically speaking: Nope! If you just progress through the Adventure Regions, things will still unlock as you go, just like how they did before! The main change for you is that you can now also manually unlock items and work ahead without having to unlock the adventure level for it, or without having to complete the grammar lesson for it.

This makes the main study lists a lot more versatile in use, as you can unlock anything you want at any time to get a specific item (from the main lists) in your queue.

Before, you could also do this, but you’d either have to make a personal study list and add the items to that, or grab the complete main study list from the premade section. Now that’s not needed anymore unless you want to, of course

How do I manually unlock things?

You can manually unlock items by going to the manage items page of one of the main study lists → selecting the item(s) you want to unlock → clicking on “unlock items” in the actions dropdown and boom! The new items are queued for your upcoming lessons!

As you can see in the screenshot, we also show you which items are locked and which aren’t, through a lock icon. That way you can quickly see which ones you have left to do, and which are still locked.

We’ve also added a way for you to filter items on their locked state, which you can combine with other filters and search queries too.

A quick note on this: You do not need to do this at all if you just want to unlock things as you go in Adventure (how it was before). This still works the exact same way. Items automatically unlock when you do a grammar lesson or complete an unlocks tile.

What’s next?

Now that we have the Main Study Lists working like this, we can finally start fine-tuning their content again! This is especially true for the Vocabulary and Kanji Main Study List. We have a lot of good changes lined up which means we’ll swap positions of some items, add new items, and even remove items. These changes will happen automatically, so you might start seeing some new items pop up in your lessons queue based on how far you’ve unlocked things!

When we make these changes, we’ll be sure to announce what we’ve changed as well, so keep an eye out for that!

Another fun thing to mention is that due to this change, the performance of many calls should now be a bit better than before, resulting in an even faster website and experience! Woohoo!

[neicul]

Spring Sale

Hi everyone!

With tax season just ending, and many of us likely feeling a bit down about finances, we’ve decided to have a bit of a spring sale!

This will be a relatively quick one (it ends on the 21st), but we’ll be slashing the price of a MM Lifetime subscription a bit. We hope this makes MaruMori more affordable for anyone who was on the fence about getting Lifetime!

With a Lifetime sub, you’re kinda “unlocking” your studies. You can say goodbye to time pressure and enjoy an unrestricted lifetime (if you so desire) of study! And if that doesn’t sound tempting, let me just say that we have some pretty awesome stuff coming up, including mock exams, a mobile app, a daily WaniKani known words sync (likely going live tomorrow!!), and much more.

Anyways, that’s all for now. We hope you’re having a great spring so far, and as always, happy studies! :marumori:

[neicul]

WaniKani Daily Sync/Import, and the new Marking items as Known feature!

Hot off the press is another new update bringing you some things that have been requested quite a bit! And for good reason too! Aside from adding a way to mark words as known (not exactly the same as suspending!) We’re pleased to say we’ve added a daily sync (or a one-time import) for WaniKani. Perfect for if you want to combine MaruMori with WaniKani!

Let’s get into it!

WaniKani Sync and Import

You can now connect your WaniKani account with MaruMori! This can be useful if you learned Vocabulary or Kanji there before, or if you are currently learning those items over at WaniKani. You can do so over at the Account Links section on the Settings page.

When you connect your account, you can select either a daily sync or a one-time import. In either case, it will grab all the items you’ve learned over at WK and mark those as “known” in MM (unless you already have SRS progress on an item in MM, then it ignores it). You can also select a minimum SRS level so that it will only mark items at that level or higher (in WK) as known.

If you do not select the daily sync option, it becomes a one-time import of known items from WaniKani. Perfect for if you aren’t actively studying on WaniKani anymore (level 60 anyone??).

As you can imagine, this is a game-changer for those of you using both WK and MM, as it ensures that what you learned over there gets marked as known, and thus stays out of your lesson and review queue on MM. Along with another benefit!

Mark As Known

We’ve added options for you to mark things as known on multiple different pages, such as the Manage Items page of a Study List.

Now you might be wondering how this is different from just suspending items. Well, marking items as known has some additional benefits! Items marked as known will also count for the adaptive furigana during Grammar SRS (and soon, other pages too!), and for things like the Satori Reader Sync. This makes the Grammar SRS even better for those bringing kanji and vocabulary knowledge from elsewhere!

We’ll likely also implement a way for known items to show up in your progress statistics (such as the JLPT kanji/vocabulary bars) soon, so you can truly flex your actual knowledge!

So, if you know an item already, you mark it as known, if you just don’t want to learn/review an item, you suspend it.

Of course, we also indicate whether items are known on the relevant pages. And we’ve also added a way to mark items as unknown in case you change your mind later on!

To make things easier, we’ve also added in some extra filters for the manage items list. You can now also filter by “known”, “unknown”, or “unknown & unsuspended” status.

Oh, and we’ve also adjusted the known vocab/kanji import tool, to mark things as known rather than suspend. So it truly lives up to its name now!

Small note: Be careful with the known import tool if you are already learning on MaruMori though, as this one does not keep in mind your current learning progress of the items you put into it. However, you can always mark the items as unknown again to continue your studies (it won’t ever wipe out your progress).

[aypro2k]

I tried connecting Wanikani to my MaruMori account, but i keep getting “Linking WaniKani failed! Please double-check if the API Token you’ve given us is correct.”, i tried using both a read-only key and a full access key without avail.