MaruMori.io & Kitsun.io - [UPDATE: Quests & Challenges System! - N2 Complete! - MaruDex Early Access Release (Cross-Platform OCR Immersion Mining Tool)] Grammar SRS, In-Depth Grammar Lessons, Reading Exercises, Vocabulary, Kanji and more!

[neicul]

MaruDex Android - Early Access Launch!

Hot on the heels of our MaruDex Desktop release is the MaruDex Android release! Google has approved our app, meaning it’s available for all supporters to test on Android, right now!

Unsure what MaruDex is? Check it out with the link below as it’s something we think every Japanese learner (using MaruMori or in general) should be using for their studies:

https://marudex.io

We’re particularly excited about this Android version because it feels very intuitive to use with touch controls. We’ve also made a special dual-screen mode for (retro) gaming devices like the AYN Thor, so that when you tap on a red box, it displays all the information and lookup tabs on the bottom screen. That gives you an uninterrupted (retro) gaming session!

You can find the latest download link on the marudex.io website.

Just like on desktop, it handles a good mix of media and content, with the exact same accuracy and performance. This means you can use it for manga, novels, youtube, games and so on! We believe we’ve created the most accurate and fast OCR available for Japanese on Android right now!

We hope you enjoy using MaruDex in combination with MaruMori to enhance your Japanese studies! If you have any feedback, ideas, bug reports or suggestions, make sure to drop by our discord where we have dedicated channels for MaruDex feedback!

[wojtek]

@neicul

Oh I’m not entirely sure, I’ll have to test that out. Though the globe might be a bit of an issue, as it is the keyboard language switch (for me at least)?

Well, you can configure what it does. I opted for “do nothing” and use it as modifier, for example to access multimedia keys above F1-F12, or in other apps.

Though it may require some juggling as macOS and Fn key is “funny”

@neicul

That said, a new update went live that lets you rebind much more easily through a visual hotkeys modal, so it should be a lot easier to rebind in general now (announcement coming here later, I’m lagging behind on other announcements here too haha)

Yay! The new window is really handy! <3

[neicul]

Multiple Mock Exams Make a Massive Movement!

WHAT’S THAT? WHAT DID YOU SAY? YOU’VE AN URGENT NEED FOR A SMASH BURGER? YOU’VE MADE FRIENDS WITH A SAVVY ANT? SORRY I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF THE… MOCK EXAM DROP COPTER!!! EXTREME HELICOPTER NOISES; EXPLOSIONS; EPIC SOUNDS !!!

That’s right! We’ve got an absolute metric, and also imperial tonne (or is it ton?) of mock exams to drop directly on you. Right now, yes, now!!!

Take cover, because coming in hot is:

• N4 listening section #2 (BOOM!)
• N3 vocab/grammar/reading sections for exam #4 and #5 (KA-BOOM!)
• N2 vocab/grammar/reading sections for exam #2 and #3 (… SHABANG!)

And that’s not even all!!! N3 listening #2 is currently being loaded into the proverbial mock exam cannon, as well as N2 exams #4 and #5! What are you even going to do with all of these exams?!

Expect listening sections for all exams to become available soon as well, but for all of you July JLPT-takers, this is surely enough? Right??? (Please say it’s enough… I’m, I’m tired.)

That’s all for now, over and out, happy studies, foxtrot, tango, etc.!

[Escalus]

Any plans to add Kitsun support to MaruDex?

[neicul]

No plans for that for now, maybe in the future!

[neicul]

MaruDex Desktop v0.5.3 - New Update & Intel Mac Release!

Hi again!

Hopefully everyone’s been able to try out MaruDex and it’s been helpful to your studies! Today we’ve released an update for MD Desktop (so, not Android, but it’s also getting an update very soon after this!) bringing not just a few new features and bugfixes, but also a new build specifically for Intel Macs.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with MaruDex just yet, please take a look at:

https://marudex.io

Be sure to also download this latest version manually if you’re on a Mac or Linux device, as our update notifier wasn’t working properly on those platforms (should be fixed from this update onwards!). For those of you on Windows, it should prompt you with an update notification upon startup of MD.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it!

New Features

• Intel Mac Releases - To support older (non-Silicon) Macs we’ve added a new Intel Mac build to the downloads section of the landing page. This build is fairly experimental, as we have no Intel mac to test with ourselves, but from beta testing with some users, it does seem to work!

• Hotkeys modal - We’ve added a much more user friendly and visual way of setting your MD OCR hotkey. Clicking the “change” button will open a modal which lets you click on the keys you want, or you can press the keys you want on your keyboard and it will automatically register them too. As an added bonus, it’s no longer required to restart MaruDex after changing your hotkey.

  

• Mouse button hotkeys - As part of the hotkey change, we’ve also implemented support for mouse buttons while at it. Even a combination like CTRL+ middle mouse is possible too.

  

Bug Fixes

• More accurate OCR on high resolution screens - We’ve changed the way overlapping text on “tiles” (screenshots of 2000x2000, to keep the OCR accurate) is “repaired”. Resulting in text no longer splitting or showing weird results when its on the edge of a tile. This behaviour only showed up on high-resolution devices, as we need to split the full screenshot into multiple tiles before processing.

• Hotkeys - Previously, if you accidentally set a wrong hotkey, MD would crash upon restart. This is now fixed, and there is no way to set up a wrong hotkey anymore.

• Updates Notifier - Mac and Linux weren’t receiving an “Update Available” download prompt when a new MaruDex update was released, this should be fixed now. From this version onwards you won’t have to manually go to marudex.io to download the latest version anymore.

• Mac - The Silicon Mac builds are now 100% ARM based, meaning no more notifications about support dropping soon (or in newer OS versions, outright crashes).

We’ve got quite a few other announcements coming up, so be sure to keep an eye out

[GolyBidoof]

i know i’m not saying anything revolutionary by posting in this thread but

i wanted to express my anticipation leading towards a potential anniversary sale in august, would really like to get the app after the trial blocked me after finishing the trial-available content, but i’ll give myself a few more days hoping that eventually @neicul puts the app on sale

[neicul]

It’s most likely starting on Tuesday!

[BigSalad87]

@neicul Hi there. Can I ask how far along the site is with regards to N2 lesson material?

I know your team is working on a lot of cool stuff, but the N2 is most relevant to me (with December drawing closer and closer).

[neicul]

On Tuesday our second to last N2 batch drops, so the last batch to complete the region should be dropping in about two weeks, 25th of August!

After finishing N2 we’ll be taking a small break from Adventure content in order to focus on a few other content related projects as well as do some prep work for getting a nice N1 buffer going. But we expect the first N1 drops well before the end of the year, and to resume our bi-weekly schedule for those as usual from that point onwards

[GolyBidoof]

Thank you, I put my money where my mouth was and I ended up buying in! I’m intending on following the grammar N2 course all the way to the end before my December exam in Düsseldorf at a rate of two tiles a day and I’ll see how I do C:

I’m still in the discovery process, I was on the fence whether MaruMori would be worth my money, but I found the MaruDex be a really cool spin on Yomininja/Meikipop/Meikidroid and I’m glad it’s integrated so well with the rest of the platform!

So far it’s working pretty well on my main display (no way of selecting which monitor/rectangle should be monitored though!) and I really appreciate the grammar hints on the form progression, I wonder how it’ll end up comparing to reading EPUBs through ttsu/Yomitan in the long run

The actual actual straw that broke the camel’s back is that MaruDex supports two-display handhelds on Android, thank you for supporting Ayn Thor and I might turn it into my Playstation Vita/Nintendo Switch eventually ^^

[MPKelley]

Any chance MaruDex will support Kitsun at any point?

[neicul]

No such plans at the moment, but maybe in the future.

[neicul]

Our Anniversary Sale has started!

Can you believe it? Maru(Mori) turns three years old! These three years somehow feel like both a lifetime and just yesterday.. We still can’t quite believe that we’re almost done with the N2 (complete in 2 weeks!) region and it’s content! Let alone all the features and other content we’ve been adding to the platform over these past three years.. And we’re still just getting started! We have so many more things coming up, some of which I’ll give a little tease about below…

But first, the moment many of you have been waiting for…

Our anniversary sale has gone live! You can go get a discount on lifetime here:

https://marumori.io/billing

Or if you still need a bit of convincing, you might want to check out this little page:

MaruMori - Learn Japanese

---

Anyways, back to teasing some upcoming stuff again.

The artwork for the N1 region is done! Here’s a little teaser:

Spooky! And what’s that crack in the floor

And then there’s talk about some “quests” and “rewards” and things..

Wonder what that’s about..

We’re also hard at work to revamp the kanji elements, breakdowns and corresponding stories, and might even have something big related to that in the workings too..

We also have a bunch of minigames getting ready to be unleased upon the world soon.

And we can’t forget about our reading exercises rework either, that’s going to be a real big one for many people I think!

But more on all of this later, for now let’s celebrate Maru’s birthday / MaruMori’s anniversary first!

[neicul]

Final N2 Content Drop!

Fade in

Interior, desert cave

Lens flare

Obi-Wan Kenobi steps into frame

Obi-Wan: Hello there! (Obi-Wan Kenobi voice)

I see you’ve made it to the final few lessons of the (checks notes) JLPT N2 region! (Whispers: whatever that means)

Well, I’m proud of you. I’m sure whatever you did to get this far took a lot of work, grit, determination and also, bravery. You know, when I was faced with certain death fighting the evil sith lord, Darth Maul,…

Fade to black

Push title: “THE FINAL BATCH”

Lens flare

Thank you Obi-Wan Kenobi. You truly were, our only hope.

That aside, I’d like to congratulate everyone who adventured through the Sands of Mastery on making it all the way to the very end. What a fantastic achievement!

As always, we’ve got some Jedi-worthy grammar points for you, such as ～から見たら which you can use to judge people! Or there’s ～ところを見ると which you can also use to judge people! And for our final N2 grammar lesson, we’ll be going over ～ばと思います, which you can use to create very polite, indirect requests.

And in terms of vocabulary, you’ll be happy to know that you will finally be learning how to say both “darkness” and “reckless” both of which use 闇, as well as 鑑賞 for “appreciation”, and after all this time, the kanji for あいさつ (挨拶)!

For the final N2 reading, go to an open house, learn about the purifying powers of clams, and eavesdrop on Shiori, Steve, and Mike as they chat about some of the worst dates of all time.

All of this, and everything that came before it, awaits you now,… in the Sands of Mastery!

Happy studies!

Does anyone smell something vaguely volcanic?

[neicul]

I just realised I completely skipped over your post! Thanks so much for the support!

Awesome to see yet another Thor owner in the MM ranks haha, our discord also has a few members with Thors. So cool to see! It’s a perfect learner’s device due to having a secondary screen for lookups haha.

[neicul]

Huge New Website Update Containing a TON of Requested Features

Hey everyone!

We’ve got a big website update for you today! It includes a whole bunch of smaller improvements and bug fixes, as well as quite a few new features. Several of which are among some of our most requested user suggestions. Are you excited?! Because I’m excited! Come on, let’s check ‘em out together

New Features:

Quick Study Reordering!

Quick Study - Reorder settings are now available in quick study! So if you’ve ever wondered why you couldn’t change the order of your quick study reviews like you can with your regular SRS reviews, well… now you can. Yay!!

Quick Study Results!

Speaking of quick study, in order to make your quick study experience even better, we’ve also added a fancy new results page! This means that from now on you’ll be able to see a detailed breakdown of your performance after each review session, including which items you got right and which items you could maybe use a tinyyy bit more practice on (I’m not judging). And if you don’t want to stop there, you can choose to hit the Practise Mistakes button and jump straight into another quick study session of the items you got wrong. How cool is that?!

Grammar SRS Accepted answer explanations!

This next one is a change we’re quite excited about over here at MaruMori headquarters! From now on whenever you’re doing your grammar reviews and you submit an answer that differs in some way from the one we were looking for, we’ll provide you with a quick explanation about how those differences might have impacted the sentence you constructed.

Sometimes the explanation will be as simple as letting you know that your sentence was just as good as the original (go you!) and other times the explanation will point out things like missing punctuation and when the formality of your sentence doesn’t entirely match the provided prompt.

Review Wrap Up

We get it, sometimes you need to end a review session before you’ve actually completed all of your reviews. And when that happens, you often end up with half-finished reviews still floating around that you’d prefer to complete before ending the session. That’s why we’ve added a new wrap up feature that lets you do just that! It gives you the opportunity to answer only the reviews you’ve already started answering but not quite wrapped up yet and come back to the rest later. Just tap the stopwatch icon at the top (next to lightning mode etc) to wrap up your session.

Grammar Library Quick Filters (Grammar Concepts etc)

As another cool grammar addition for you all, we’ve taken all the same quick filters available to you in the adventure dashboard view and applied them to the grammar library as well. Quickly view all grammar points related to adjectives for example!

And if you aren’t very familiar with the grammar library, you can find it located at the top of the Resources tab. It’s a super helpful resource for when you want to look up a grammar point but you don’t want to take the time to go back through the entire grammar lesson. The shorter grammar library entries cover the most important points and sometimes a refresher is all you need. Which means you now have no excuse to skip out on your grammar studies! Sorry not sorry.

Study List Reordering

Study Lists - This is one of those highly requested features I hinted at in the introduction. And even better than that, it’s actually the most requested feature. So without further ado, I give you… the ability to reorder your study lists! So if you added the N4 vocabulary list before the N5 vocabulary list and the fact that they’re out of order is now slowly driving you mad, or if you want to keep all your cat manga study lists together, or if your current arrangement is just giving you bad vibes, you can now rearrange them all to your heart’s content!

Add to Synonyms & Submit as Correct button for SRS

To make the review process a little smoother, we’ve added a button that allows you to quickly add an incorrect answer as a personal synonym and automatically submit it as correct. This is best used for those times when you’ve submitted an answer that’s a synonym of the correct answer but isn’t among the accepted answers yet, so it erroneously gets marked as incorrect. This saves you from having to retype the answer and also adds it as a synonym so that it doesn’t get marked incorrect again in the future.

Reading at Meaning Prompt Shakes!

And while we’re on the topic of making your SRS experience a little more painless, we’ve also made it so that if you accidentally submit a reading when you’re being prompted for the meaning, you’ll now be shown a message letting you know we’re actually looking for the meaning and you’ll be given an opportunity to correct your mistake.

Improvements:

• Statistics - Study History - Users can now filter their study history by year, and the year is also displayed alongside each month for added clarity.

• SRS - Demotions - Previously learned items demoted to level 0 will now count only once for your statistics. So doing the lesson for it again will not show up as 2 vocab/kanji learned anymore.

• SRS - Statistics - Related to the above, over the next couple of days everyone’s “true” totals will be recalculated based on the change mentioned above. So if you ever demoted an item to 0, expect your counts to go down a bit for statistics and such!

• Statistics - Study History - Greatly improved the speed at which the page loads. We’re blazin’ fast nowww.

• Study Friends - Overview - Same deal here, greatly improved the speed at which it all loads. Zoooom

• JLPT Mock Exams - Now renders only 3 choices for the listening question types with only 3 options in the audio.

• SRS - Vocabulary and Kanji where the answer has a number in it should now be very strict. If the number doesn’t match, it will fail the review (e.g. to prevent “2 things” from being accepted for “3 things” due to typo allowances).

• Streak - A confirmation dialog will now appear before using a streak restore token to prevent accidental use.

• Kanji Imposters - The results page now includes dictionary links for each kanji.

• Grammar SRS - Check mark and cross icons have been added to help indicate correct and incorrect answers.

• SRS - Reviews - You can now “skip” reviews and come back to them at the end of your review session when you’re feeling a little more ready to tackle them.

• Streak - When attempting to restore a streak without a restore token, you will now get a message indicating the number of days until your next restore token.

• Adventure - Added sparkles to secrets

• SRS - Stories - More kanji elements are now available when creating custom stories.

Bugfixes:

• Grammar Lessons - Fixed a visual bug that prevented likes on comment replies from appearing.

• Grammar Lessons - Fixed an issue where the “Always Visible” furigana setting did not apply to kanji in exercises.

• SRS - Multiple forms of the same item in a single review session will no longer cause one of them to not be finished after completing both reviews.

• SRS - Fixed an issue where marking the last item in a session as known or suspending it would cause the page to freeze.

• Adventure - Furigana will now render correctly in adventure tile information modals.

• Transitivity Trainer - Fixed a bug where the font for 汚す and 汚れる would render incorrectly for some users.

• Statistics - Study History - Days without activity no longer have transparent and difficult to read tooltips.

• Study Lists - Manage - Fixed an issue that caused the styling of status labels (known and suspended) to not display correctly.

• Statistics - Study History - Fixed an issue that caused lessons for items previously demoted to 0 to not appear under study history.

• SRS - Lightning Mode - When submitting feedback or editing stories, lightning mode would sometimes break for some users. This has now been fixed.

• Sitewide - Fixed an issue where the ESC key failed to close certain modals.

• Statistics - Study history and graphs previously used different date formats. Both now use the same format.

• Study Lists - Todo items were incorrectly labeled as level 10 in tooltips. This has now been corrected.

• Home - The Home button now correctly refreshes the page when already on the homepage.

• Adventure - Sands of Mastery - Fixed an issue with map view where you would no longer be taken directly to Maru’s location after completing tiles in the second area.

• SRS - Fixed an issue where mixed kana words containing a “ー” were not accepted as correct answers.

• SRS - Fixed an issue where editing a personal synonym during reviews would replace inputs with the text “Meaning”.

  And that’s it for this changelog! Hopefully there was at least one change you’ve been looking forward to in here somewhere, and if not, we’ll have more updates coming for you soon as always Bye for now!

[neicul]

New Quests System - Season 1 Begins!

Hey all!

We’re very excited to announce the launch of our new quests system today. It’s already live for both website and the mobile apps! We’ve teased it briefly in recent announcements but today is the day you finally get to try it out for yourself!

First, let’s talk about where to find it: You might have noticed that the home page layout is a little bit different now, as there is a new widget! This widget displays your current seasonal level/exp, as well as today’s quests. From there you can also open the Quest Journal, which we’ll showcase a bit below!

The quest system follows a seasonal structure, with each season spanning three months and bringing with it a new set of quests to complete and rewards to unlock.

Quests are daily, weekly, and monthly study goals for you to work towards that grant season EXP and rewards when completed. There are four main daily quests which represent the tasks that should make up the core of your study routine. These are vocabulary and kanji lessons, SRS reviews, adventure tiles, and quick study. The remaining daily quests rotate through various trainers and minigames, encouraging you to mix up your studies and engage with Japanese in different ways. And while you don’t have to complete all daily quests, completing at least three will earn you a bonus item!

As you earn season EXP and level up, you’ll unlock new rewards every two levels, which can be claimed from the Rewards tab. These rewards include items that grant account EXP outright as well as study charms that provide temporary EXP boosts, but can also include cosmetics! Things like earning a special title, badge and more.

Eventually, we want to tie this into a “Houses” system as well, where you can earn items to strengthen your “House” (think Harry Potter’s Gryffindor etc), but more on that later

Once you’ve claimed your rewards, they’ll appear in your inventory for you to use (or hoard) as you see fit!

In addition to quests, we’ve also added challenges. Challenges are permanent and correspond directly to existing achievements, meaning they won’t reset with the seasons like quests do. These mark major milestones in your studies that you’ll reach only once, and we hope the additional rewards make reaching them feel even more impactful!

Ultimately, the goal with this new system is to encourage healthy and consistent study habits, add a little more structure to your studies, and make learning Japanese an even more enjoyable experience in the process.

Oh and we didn’t officially announce this just yet, but it’s been live for a while: Since we now track even more of your daily studies for the quests, we’ve also decided that this was the right time to introduce experience gains from things that previously gave no experience. For example, quick study and certain trainers/mini-games!

Now get out there and show those quests who’s boss! Good luck, have fun, and happy questing!