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

Hey all! Hope your studies are going well!

As you might have noticed, yesterday we had some 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 a faster website and experience! Woohoo!

Satori Reader Sync and Collaboration!

Hi everyone!

I'm glad to finally 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!

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 (per 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!

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 (1)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.

Content Updates Roundup

Heyo! In this content changelog, I’ll quickly go over some of our last few content updates, as well as our game plan moving forward over the next few months.

Grammar SRS

After one final game-winning push of putting out a big batch of grammar points every Friday, the content team has caught grammar SRS up to current content! This means you can now expect grammar lessons to drop fully equipped with grammar SRS items for you to unlock and drill. We think this is the ideal way to internalize grammar, as you can go straight from reading the lesson content, into drilling the patterns. For now, every two weeks five new lessons will drop along with grammar SRS points. This pacing may change, but more on that in a moment…

N3 Progress

We’ve also been hard at work progressing through N3, and I’m happy to say that we already have 20 grammar lessons published, along with their grammar SRS points, as well as four reading exercises. Our plan moving forward is to keep publishing N3 content at a steady and sustainable pace, while also leaving time to work on content in other areas as well (mock exams, anyone?). Over the coming weeks, we’ll evaluate whether or not we can increase our current pace of 7 adventure levels/two weeks, and potentially provide new N3 content even quicker.

New (content) stuff???

Speaking of new content, we have a couple of new features in the works. One big one is our JLPT mock exam tool. This has been on the back burner for a little while as we focused on grammar SRS, but we’ll be returning to it soon and hope to provide the community with an awesome tool for test practice and self-assessment. We also have a huge number of new native-content study lists inbound, so be on the lookout for those in the near future.