MaruMori.io & Kitsun.io - [Spring Sale! Mobile App General Release & MaruDex Cross-Platform OCR Lookup Tool Teaser!] Grammar SRS, In-Depth Grammar Lessons, Reading Exercises, Vocabulary, Kanji and more!

Activations done!

I’ve activated 50 new accounts!
That’s 150% more than normal, I hope the servers hold out :smiley:

Nah, I don’t need it done for me. But I think it might be valuable in general to be able to link cards after the fact. You wouldn’t need to know which cards should be siblings since the user would indicate it somehow when then want to link to cards. It could help reduce frustration when someone creates cards separately at first (maybe they don’t know about the feature) so they don’t lose their SRS progress. Similarly, it could help resolve issues with importing Anki decks that don’t include the proper links.

I am super stoked and can’t wait till I get home to explore Kitsun! Thank you! :heart_eyes_cat:

Finally activated :smiley: thanks!

My first thought is that I’d 100% want a help guide if I was paying for the product, but I can see that you’re working on that next :slight_smile:
Gonna start trying out the site now!

Edit:
When I’m on the All Cards page, what should I be seeing on the front of the cards? Currently mine are all blank.

Edit 2:
So I worked out that the “English” field is what shows up on the All Cards page. Is there a reason it’s called “English” rather than something like “card name” or “title”? Sorry if this is a really stupid question!

@seanblue while I agree that it might be handy, the problem with that is that it can bring a lot of problems. I.e. the user could try to merge two different cards together, the srs progress might differ, the values might differ, the layouts used might be incompatible or already used in the original etc. It’s something I might consider in the future if there is a lot of demand for it.

@VanillaButt great to hear! The website is still lacking a lot of usabilty tweaks and features. So if you need help feel free to ask!

@sjora Thanks! Sorry for the late reply, I was sleeping.

There will be a help page and other features to get new users started, before launch, right now its still lacking that due to focus on feature development. So the first impression might be that it’s a bit too overwhelming. Sorry for the inconvenience!

It is using the “English” field as that is probably the main value of that layout. If you use a custom set (or duplicate the defaults) layouts, you can select which field you would like as the “display field”. Which is the field value you will be seeing in the all cards screen :slight_smile:

This is very exciting… I have an account!
But, erm, what I need now is a how-to-use guide!
I’ve never used anki, only ever studied with WK (and a bit with Bunpro till it got too overwhelming), so have no idea what I’m doing here.
I assume that at some stage a FAQ or something will be added? I can’t see one now.

Edit: I’ve just seen that this has already been asked! But right now I’m lost as to how to start and terrified of pressing a wrong button somewhere!

You may want to check out the second post in this thread - lots of helpful how-to info there ^^

Thank you so much! Studying it now!

Hi!

Yes, a FAQ and Guide will be added later on (sorry about that!). For now you could take a look at post #2 or follow the mini-guide below:

  • Create a new deck → Just fill in the name and description and hit save.
  • Start creating new cards for the deck (there is a button on the page after saving the deck). → Pick a template then pick the layouts you’d want and start filling in the values for the card.
  • Seeing as you’re learning Japanese, you probably want to have “Kitsun - Vocabulary” as the template, and “Kitsun - JP → ENG” & “Kitsun - ENG → JP” as the layouts :slight_smile:

Another option is to import an anki deck or a word list. The import feature can be found in the settings page. The system will automatically create everything you need to start learning the deck/wordlist right away. (Although you might need to do some extra tweaks in order to get JP input support or to tweak the way it looks)

If anything is unclear, please feel free to ask! Making it easy for new users to start without having to do anything complicated is top priority for me, but as the website is currently still under heavy development, I haven’t been able to make the required changes yet. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Edit:
I would also like to note that Community decks will be coming in the near future. Making it easy for anyone to start learning decks made by other users (if they choose to set it as public).

And there will be some standard decks (i.e. JLPT Vocab divided by levels) to choose from which will be made available by Kitsun as well :slight_smile:

Since this is not implemented yet, it leaves currently testers in a bit of a awkward situation if they haven’t worked with a SRS system like anki before

That is great! I’ve now very slowly made a deck (yet to figure out the difference between a deck and a folder) and made two cards, both with grammar format. Slowly, slowly, getting there! Thank you so much, this really does look like a superb learning resource!

A deck contains your cards, a folder can contain other decks (you can drag and drop decks onto the created folder). This way you can organise your decks page if you have many decks :slight_smile:

I’m glad you enjoy it so far! I will try my best to make it all a bit easier as soon as possible.

Please let me know if you release an API documentation for Kitsun, as I am trying to sync my app with Anki and Kitsun is probably more ideal to sync with than AnkiConnect. (Because of 1. truly always online 2. official support )

I’m trying to add SRS to my app. It’s time to type-in the Pinyin…

BTW, do you have a problem with data size when importing Hinekidori’s 10k deck? The size is roughly 700M. – Of course, shared decks and TTS would be more ideal…

I will not release API documentation for the internal API, as it’s not meant to be used by users/scripts, I can help you out with setting it up through PMs or Discord (if you have it?) though, as the public API is still a ways off (low priority right now).

Hine’s 10k (and even 15k) deck import without problems. Any decks smaller than 1gb should work :slight_smile:

Three thoughts…

  1. There’s no picture on the tab for Kitsun on the top of my computer

  2. Now I have an account I’m wondering how to go about creating cards, any tips?

  3. I’ve created three test cards so far (based on the first pages of にゃんにゃん) but something’s gone wrong with one of them - it’s blank!

I’m determined to learn this. I’ve never used it, but everyone says Anki is great, and so the idea of an on-line Anki (I use a Chromebook) is brilliant!

Correct, the picture is not included yet. It’s been on my to-do list for a while but I keep on forgetting to do it. I’ll fix it with the next update!

I would suggest one of the following:

  • Start adding vocab (etc) that you encounter during consumption of Japanese materials (studybooks/books/manga/anime/series/games etc)
  • Perhaps import an existing anki deck or a csv/txt wordlist? I plan on adding default JLPT decks for every user within the next two weeks though, so it might be easier to wait a bit :slight_smile:

Or did you mean something else?

I’ve taken a look and added the value to the “English” field of the card. For this layout, the “English” field is considered the display field. Meaning that it will show up as blank if you don’t fill it in.

As stated before, I will simplify the process a lot within the next few weeks so keep an eye out for that :slight_smile:

Thanks for your feedback!

Wow! Thank you! That is brilliant!

The picture on the tab is very useful for when you bookmark sites, I just have a long row of pictures on the toolbar, saves a lot of space. So that’s brilliant.

Yes, I was wondering about tips for creating cards yourself. Using stuff I read (Nyan-nyan, Yotsuba, etc) but making effective use of it. You know, the best way to make a card, the kind of things to do. Just wondering if anyone has any ideas.

And thanks for looking into my blank card. It might be worth labelling the columns front and back in the edit mode for novices like me! Somehow I just couldn’t figure it out!

Thanks again so much for all your help and your amazing site!

@marcusp Thanks for the compliments!

I would always try to add the following to your cards:

  • Kanji (if it’s in there)
  • Reading in hiragana
  • Main meaning
  • Other possible meanings
  • Example sentence (having the context of the word really helps with understanding)
  • Perhaps audio or an image if possible?

Then I’d use the following layouts:
Eng → JP
JP → Eng
JP → Reading

That way you got all you need for learning the vocab imo. If you want, you could also start adding layouts for listening skills (hear the audio, answer in english / readings?)

Then just creating cards whenever you encounter a word you don’t know yet seems to be the most effective (for me at least). The built in SRS system behaves like WK if you don’t alter it yourself, so the rest should be automatic :smiley:

Btw, there will be no update tonight. Life got in the way today so I didn’t have enough time to finish new features, yet. Expect a bigger one on Sunday to make up for it!

Just to add to what neicul said -

You can select multiple layouts when creating a card. This means that you can fill in the info, select all three of the layouts neicul suggested (EN > JP, JP > EN, JP > reading), and it will just automatically generate all three cards for you :ok_hand:

You can also then tell kitsun that you want those layouts to be the defaults for that deck, if you think those are the ones you’ll always / usually be using. You can always add or remove layouts when creating specific cards if you need; it just saves a bit of time.

If you’re at all confused as to which fields go where, the dynamic preview at the bottom when you’re creating cards is awesome. Not only should you be able to see where each field goes, but as you fill in the info you can see it appear in the preview. So you can see where ‘English’ and ‘meanings’ and so on will appear (‘readings’ and ‘meanings’ and like the answers, by the way, where ‘vocab’ and ‘english’ are what appears on the front of the cards).

I’ve been including links to relevant Jisho pages in all of my cards too, so that it’s easy to link out to more detail if I want.