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

[neicul]

Grammar SRS and LAUNCH!

Hey everyone! We’ve got some fantastic news to announce today!

We’ve launched straight outta Beta! Bringing with it our brand-spankin’ new Grammar SRS.

When we added Grammar SRS to Phase 2 on our roadmap, we didn’t think it would be the biggest and most complex feature we’ve created for MM so far… Little did we know!

Anyhow, the happy news is that it’s here, and we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved! We feel like this was the missing step to make MaruMori the real all-in-one package that you’ve been looking for.

So how does the Grammar SRS work?

In MaruMori it works a little bit differently than what you might be used to on other platforms. By default, we use two different layouts that alternate per SRS level of a Grammar Point. One layout to test you on the grammar point usage and another one to put that knowledge to use by producing actual sentences.

Fill-the-blank (Cloze)

First up we have the usual cloze/fill-the-blank type of layout that we all know:

This layout also has a few hints that you can show to help you remember the grammar point. Depending on the grammar point we have 1 to 3 hints available:

• English Translation of the sentence
• Japanese hint (using Japanese suitable for your current level)
• English hint

In this sentence, you are supposed to enter the correct form of the grammar point being asked for. In this case, it would be “です”.

Unscramble

Next up we have our Unscramble layout type:

You might know this layout from that scary owl study app called Duolingo. You click or tap on a token to form a sentence. Once you put a token up there, you can still drag it around to change the token order, or tap on it to remove it again.

Once ready, hit submit and it will validate your answer!

More Information

After entering the answer (either correct or incorrectly), you can choose to view more information by clicking the button or simply by scrolling down the page:

There we show you the same information as what we have available in our Grammar Library for that Grammar Point. Which is:

• A description
• A summary
• A link to the related grammar lesson (where we explain it in depth)
• Multiple Example Sentences (at least 12 level-appropriate example sentences, but often many more!)
• All related Grammar Points

What if I only want a specific layout?

By default, the layouts alternate per SRS level. This means that in your lessons, it will always be fill-the-blank. Your first review will always be unscramble, your next review will always be fill-the-blank again, and so on.

However, if you wish to only get a specific layout all the time, you can go to the global settings page and change your preference there:

Cool! So how do I get started with this?

Well, we have multiple ways to start SRSing Grammar! To begin with we gave everyone a new main Study List specifically for Grammar Points that you unlock as homework after completing a Grammar Lesson in Adventure.

Just hit that Mark as Done button in a grammar lesson and it will put these items in your main grammar study list.

For users who had already completed the grammar lessons before we released the Grammar SRS, we’ve added the items to your main grammar study list already and will continue doing this with all upcoming items releases too.

Next to this, you can also create your own grammar study lists and add Grammar Points to them manually.

Because Grammar SRS is such a different beast from SRSing Vocabulary and Kanji, we’ve also overhauled the Home page to show your lessons and reviews per SRS type and have updated the timeline to also show upcoming grammar reviews.

I think that’s about it for the Grammar SRS! We hope you get a lot of good use out of it, as it’s great to have a way to practice whatever you just learned in our Grammar Lessons!

What’s next?

The sale has ended now that we’ve officially launched It’s been a great success thanks to you all! In the coming period, the Grammar SRS will continue to improve and get expanded upon along with the rest of the website (and mobile apps). We’re all super motivated to deliver the best possible Japanese study resource out there, and we feel like this has been a massive step forward toward that goal!

In terms of content, we’re still going strong with our bi-weekly Adventure content drops (N4 is pretty far done!). I can’t wait to show you our new N3 region. It’s looking absolutely gorgeous! Aside from that, we will keep on releasing Grammar SRS items as we complete them to fill up the gap between those and our latest Grammar Lessons. We’ll be figuring out a schedule for that as we go in the coming weeks, so more on that soon!

We have so many awesome things coming up, but this changelog entry is getting enormous so I’ll fill you in on those things next time!

Again, thank you all so much for making the launch such a success! You’re the best!

[neicul]

New MM Update!

Hello! Over the past few days, we’ve been getting out a big bunch of bugfixes, so I figured it’s time to consolidate them all into a proper changelog

Small Improvements

• Grammar Library - Exercises - Changed the fill-the-blank exercise styling to fit much better

• Home & Study List Dashboard - SRS Rank Breakdowns - You can now hover over the color squares to view a level breakdown for Beginner and Novice ranked items.

Bugfixes

• Onboarding - Now also properly triggers when you register through a social platform.

• Grammar Library - Fixed an issue that made the grammar library pages inaccessible without being logged in.

• Statistics - Longest Streak Count was off by one day

• Home - Fixed some issues with calculating the streak count

• Grammar Library - Overview - Fixed an issue where it only has one column of grammar points on Firefox browsers

• Dictionary - MaruBot (Discord Bot) - Fixed an issue where the Add to Study List modal would open twice

• SRS - Fixed the results page having incorrect colors and links for vocabulary items

• Notifications (on-site) - Clicking on the related user of an “X liked your comment” or other social-type notifications now brings you to the correct profile page.

• Comments - Top comments now load the user avatars correctly.

• Comments - Fixed an issue where your username, avatar, badges, and titles would not be visible after adding a new comment.

• SEO - Fixed an issue where Marumori link thumbnails would not show up correctly.

• Home & Study List Dashboard - Timeline - Fixed an issue where the upcoming grammar reviews bar could go way out of bounds.

• Home & Study List Dashboard - Timeline - Now properly stacks upcoming review bars.

We’ve got a few very nice new features coming up in the coming days too, so be on the lookout for that too!

[jprspereira]

@neicul

We’ve got a few very nice new features coming up in the coming days too, so be on the lookout for that too!

Legends say that we’ll be able to add each other as friends soon.

[neicul]

Leveling up!

Another new MM update! This time we’ve got some fun new stuff, major improvements to the Statistics page load time, and new statistics, all in one!

Leveling Up The Level Up

Let’s start with something new that triggers when you level up on MaruMori. I think a gif will show it better than I can describe:

https://data.marumori.io/changelog/level-up-recording-2.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

That’s right, we’ve got confetti!

We also improved our Achievement/Unlock System a bit with this change. Achievements will now also trigger directly after unlocking them, where applicable, except during things like SRS Reviews, where they will trigger on the results screen instead.

New Statistics & Load Speeds

We’ve just finished up a complete rewrite and restructure of storing your study history in the database. Long story short, this makes the Statistics page load 20-100x faster for our most fanatic users who were getting a ton of studying done on MM This also meant we could start showing a few new statistics and improve a few existing ones!

Like these grammar SRS accuracy statistics

Or being able to see how many lessons/reviews of each item type you did (Kanji, Vocabulary, or Grammar SRS)

More Is On The Way

We have even more exciting features coming up in the next few days! We’re currently running a super secret test run of the new Friends/Buddy System, and it’s looking pretty good! Expect that (and more!) to come out in the next few days as well

[FlamySerpent]

@neicul

Let’s start with something new that triggers when you level up on MaruMori. I think a gif will show it better than I can describe:

https://data.marumori.io/changelog/level-up-recording-2.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

Really enjoying this one Those level ups from Worlde feel awesome now

@neicul

super secret test run of the new Friends/Buddy System

[chatton]

@neicul I’ve been loving MaruMori so far, I had a question regarding the reading sections of the N5/N4 paths. I’ve found these to be quite a bit more difficult than some N5/N4 sample reading sections I’ve seen in the past (more kanji, more complicated words, longer sentences etc. ).

My impression is that these readings should be quite difficult without relying on the English translations if a lot of the grammar points are new and some of the vocab is harder than N4/5, however it’s probably a good thing if we are practicing with material that is more difficult than the exam material but I wanted to get an idea of how to gauge my progress.

I also see that there are graded readers on the roadmap (excited for these!). What can we expect in terms of difficulty here? Will these be more in line with what someone at the given N level should be able to relatively-comfortably read with minimal vocab/grammar lookups?

[Natsuha]

The Kitsun app stopped working on my iphone I get the message that the beta ended.

[neicul]

Heya! Glad to hear you’re enjoying MM! The reading exercises are indeed a little bit difficult because they introduce unknown grammar concepts that you will learn in the next few lessons. In some cases they also contain vocabulary/kanji that you just unlocked in adventure, but likely did not learn through SRS just yet. We’ve been changing some of these to have multiple levels of difficulty in one exercise (so basically two different exercises in one), where the first one is meant to be easier, and the second is a bit more advanced (typically, the original exercise).

In general, I would not weight it too heavily! They are meant to be a little bit difficult as it’s your first exposure to the grammar points in the next few grammar lessons. Validating your guess with English is definitely recommended after trying to figure out what the sentence means by yourself first

@chatton

I also see that there are graded readers on the roadmap (excited for these!). What can we expect in terms of difficulty here? Will these be more in line with what someone at the given N level should be able to relatively-comfortably read with minimal vocab/grammar lookups?

We definitely want these to be super accessible and smoothly increasing in terms of difficulty. We also plan on having those same types of tooltips for every word/kanji/grammar in them as you can currently already see by clicking on a word/kanji/grammar point in an example sentence in the dictionary and grammar library. So if you do not know a word, you will be able to click on it and it will show you exactly what it is, what kanji it is using, and which grammar is being used.

[neicul]

You might have to go to the TestFlight app to trigger it to download the latest version. Typically it does this automatically, so I’m not sure why it didn’t do so for you (could be a setting?). A new version of the app went live more than a week ago

[Natsuha]

Thanks that worked.

No idea what happened I got the message that Kitsun crashed yesterday and then it stopped working.

[neicul]

Introducing MM Study Friends!

Hello hello! It’s time for the Study Friend System to be released!

Now, you might be wondering “What is that Friend System anyway?”, and I’m happy to explain this to you!

Friends? Friends!

You can now search and request other MM users to be your Study Buddy (friend)! Doing so will let you see their overall stats, their progress, and their last learned items. You can also see the weekly top 3 of your friends (including yourself) based on EXP gained the past 7 days to get a little bit of competition going!

You can access it through the Study Friends menu item in the Profile menu:

And here’s what the page looks like:

From this screen you can add new friends by searching for them:

When you click on the green add button, they will receive a notification. In the below screenshot, Yitzu just sent me a friend request:

Clicking on it brings me to the Friends page where I can accept or decline their friend request:

After accepting, you can now see their friend statistics page, and they can see yours:

We hope you enjoy studying together with your friends (or make some wonderful new friends!) on MM! We’ve already seen a bit of competition get started between friends who’ve been testing the system before public release, but please do make sure to keep it a healthy competition! Nobody wants you to burn out by taking on too many lessons!

This release is also step one of adding more community-based features to MaruMori! It lays the foundation for adding “Communities” or “Clubs” that you’ll be able to join. Think Book clubs, JLPT study groups, Anime clubs, and so on! These will have a small forum/discussion section for members, perhaps leaderboards, Community experience/level gains, direct links to native parsed study lists, and so on (depending on the type of Community)! We have a lot of ideas for this, more on that in the future!

P.S. If you also want to get access to future features earlier and have a lifetime or early panda supporter account, do be sure to join our Discord for access to our special channel.

[neicul]

New Search Options, Big Grammar Library Content Drop And More!

Another week, another update!

New Search Options

You might have noticed it already as it’s been live for a few days now, but we’ve added new search options to our website-wide search. You can now search for grammar points, kanji, or vocabulary directly:

Searching for grammar will bring you to our grammar library page and show you the matching grammar points, which in turn will give you a grammar point breakdown and link you to our corresponding in-depth Grammar Lesson (in Adventure) for further reading.

P.s. We have hotkeys! Cmd/Ctrl+K brings up the search immediately, after which you can use the arrow keys to navigate between search types.

New Grammar Breakdowns

Speaking of the Grammar Library, we’ve started filling up the gap between released breakdowns and our latest Grammar Lessons. The content team has worked really hard to get out more than 50 new grammar point breakdowns for the Grammar Library. This has of course also been done in preparation for getting new Grammar SRS items out there (more on that very soon!)

In other news, Jesse (or is it Jeff?) has joined us Full-time starting this month! Considering he’s our content lead, that means we’ll be able to get a lot more content out from now on

Smaller Improvements:

• Wordle - You can now hover over a character in the hints section to see a highlight of which other characters are in the same row or same column.
• SRS - Suggest Changes - If you forget to press enter in the tag select component before submitting, it will now automatically enter the value for you before sending the suggestion to us.

Bugfixes:

• Grammar SRS - Fixed an issue with some fill-in-the-blank questions not accepting the proper hiragana version of the grammar point.
• Wordle - Fixed the hints for Wordle, they should now be consistent on both the input spots and the hints section.
• Dictionary - Vocabulary - Vocabulary with a tilde (~) in it, such as counters, show their contained kanji again on both the dictionary pages and during SRS Lessons/Reviews.
• Profile - Fixed an issue with the username not properly updating when going from someone else’s profile page back to your own.
• Dictionary - Fixed a styling issue causing horizontal scrolling on mobile.

[whinette]

Would be cool to be able to search in everything at once!

[jesseberezan]

Book clubs hype!

[jprspereira]

@jesseberezan

Book clubs hype!

Every MM user will soon be like

[shuly]

you broke my likes button - bad panda

[jprspereira]

@shuly

bad panda

Nooo, both red pandas and red foxes deserve loveeeeee

[LangHunter]

The conjugating trainer on marumori is really helpful, thx

[jprspereira]

@LangHunter

The conjugating trainer on marumori is really helpful, thx

Hey! Glad you liked it! Feel free to fully enjoy Marumori and let us know if we can help in any way

[neicul]

New Grammar SRS content drop, Improvements and upcoming features

A few days ago a new update went live, bringing with it a whole bunch of new grammar SRS items! We’ve added Grammar SRS homework items for 10 additional Grammar Lessons, meaning 21 new grammar SRS items!

As before, if you have already completed the corresponding Grammar Lessons, they will have automatically been added to your Main Grammar Study List. If not, you will unlock them as soon as you mark the corresponding Grammar Lesson as done.

In the coming weeks, we are going to try and get out a new batch of Grammar SRS items every week and try to figure out how many we can release per week.

Improvements

• Global Search - You can now immediately press ENTER to search in vocabulary (and kanji) without having to select the search option first.
• Global Search - When using an IME to type words and pressing ENTER it would (on some devices/platforms) search right away, while you might have been composing a longer word. This has been tweaked and pressing ENTER when composing will now no longer trigger the search right away.
• Grammar SRS Lessons & Reviews - The same as above goes for Fill-The-Blank (cloze) question types! This means you can now type in the answer with your IME and press ENTER without it immediately advancing to the backside.

Bugfixes

• Grammar SRS - Fixed a lot of smaller bugs with sentence parsing going wrong, inputs being wrongly placed, and furigana appearing as undefined.
• Statistics - Adventure Statistics no longer always show a total of 1 level done per day, regardless of whether you did more than 1 or not.

Coming Up Soon (Native Material Study Lists)

We’re making some great progress on the (parsed) Native Material Study Lists at the moment. We’re planning to completely revamp our premade study lists section to accommodate all the different types of lists, as well as have everything tie into a native material database of our own, so that we can classify multiple study lists as being part of the same series (e.g. a study list per anime season, or per book volume).

We also plan on giving you a lot of statistics about how much of a (say, light-novel) study list you already know, how many words you need to know X percentage of it, how frequent those words are globally and within the specific study list and which vocabulary forms are used most, etc. Loads of useful stats to discover!

Using those statistics we can also start recommending you native materials based on how much you already know and your interests (e.g. if you mark multiple isekai light-novels as read/reading, we’d be able to recommend similar novels with similar difficulty in terms of vocabulary/kanji).