Changelog
Stay up to date with all of the latest additions and improvements!
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N5 lessons re-work & Cultural articles have dropped!
Hey all! This week we are focusing on improving some of our existing content! The first phase just went live and revolves around splitting up some heavy grammar lessons and adding some fun new cultural articles!
Rework of N5 Grammar Lessons
I’m excited to announce that we’ve fixed a few of the N5 region’s major pain points:
Added a “godan vs ichidan” mini-lesson prior to the polite form lesson
The lengthy “Types of Adjectives + Negative Adjectives” lesson has been split into two, with the second lesson exclusively covering negative forms
The very lengthy じゃない・ではない・ではありません・じゃありません lesson has been split into three articles: 「All about じゃない: The Casual Negator」, 「All about ではない: The Formal Negator」, and 「じゃありません・ではありません: Super polite negators!」
Added a mini-lesson on “Formal vs Polite” in between the じゃない and ではない lessons
These lessons were particularly tricky, especially for pure beginners, as they were long and extremely info-dense. Splitting them up should help with retention, and make the initial section of the N5 region feel more manageable.
NEW: Cultural Articles
We’ve also added a total of six cultural articles throughout the N5 region:
Anime and Manga ①: The History of Manga
Anime and Manga ② : How are they viewed in Japan?
Anime and Manga ③: Modern Cultural Trends Unique to Japan
Anime and Manga ④: "Real Japanese" VS "Anime Japanese"
All About "Yokai"
“Yes” and “No” in Japanese (How to use 「はい」 and 「いいえ」)
We want these cultural articles to be fun little additions that punctuate long stretches of grammar/unlocks/readings throughout each region, and we’ll be adding them to the N4+ regions as well in the future (possibly with their own type of tile)!
“What does this mean for my region progress/account?!”
Nothing! These changes are mainly for new learners and to add some fun extras in between all the lessons. Even if you’re not interested in reading the cultural articles, you can get some free EXP for simply completing them. Once you complete one, your current region will update to N5, but as soon as you do a tile in your initial region, it will go back to that region again 🎉
This is the first phase of the changes we have planned for this week, with phase two involving major changes to the kanji/vocab unlock list. (Yes, the ～的 vocab will finally be slightly less monolithic.) So, something to look forward to!
That’s all for now, and as always,
Happy studies!
The Verb Transitivity Trainer & Sale Ending Today!
Hello! Today we're releasing a brand new Training Tool!
The Verb Transitivity Trainer!
As you might have guessed already, this is a training tool aimed at teaching you when to use the transitive verb or the intransitive verb. We've rounded up 62 common verb pairs, of 1 transitive and 1 intransitive verb, and given each verb a unique scenario to test you with. This means we have 124 scenarios available at the moment!
You can find the new trainer in the tools section, or by clicking here!
We have 4 modes available:
Scenarios
En -> Jp
Jp -> En
Mixed
We think that out of these, scenarios are likely the most interesting to talk about here, as the other modes kind of speak for themselves!
Scenarios present you with an English sentence (a scenario), and you have to decide if you must use the intransitive verb or the transitive verb for this scenario. It looks something like this:
A keen eye might've spotted it already, but instead of clicking/tapping, you can also answer by pressing 1 or 2, and go to the next question by pressing `space`.
If you don't remember the "rules", make sure to tap on the "Help" button, and it will show you the general "rules" for when to use intransitive versus transitive verbs.
When you start a session, you will get 124 questions total, in a randomized order, but you can stop at any time you wish and it will show you your training results page where you can see your mistakes.
We think this new training tool will really help you get the hang of when to use which verb, and make the rules stick! Be sure to try it out if you could use a refresher!
P.s. Our sale is ending today! So if you still wish to grab the deal, now's your last chance!
The first MM Book Club is starting & December Community Profile roundup
Hey everyone!
We've got some exciting news from the community side of things today 
We're starting our first bookclub over on our Discord! The book is "こぐまのクーク物語 春と夏".
こぐまのクーク物語 春と夏 is a story about a little bear named クーク. It is one of the easiest "real" native books around, containing just a few kanji, not so many unique words, and furigana for all kanji! So it is a perfect candidate to get started with reading real Japanese content!
To help, we've also added a study list for the book to MaruMori. This study list is parsed just like the rest of the (Light-)novel study lists on MM, so there will be misparses at times, but it can definitely help your read-through!
We'll be starting our read-through on the 20th of January, and we'll be aiming for the pace of 1 chapter a week. Be sure to join us if you want to read your first Japanese book, or just want have a fun time with the rest of us!
You can find the book club discussion over at the #clubs channel on our Discord.
In other Discord-related news: As you may or may not know, we also have a channel for sharing your MM profile images on our Discord. The first day of the month is "profile share day" and anyone can join in!
Here's the new monthly profile share roundup from some of our Discord members:
Once again, some awesome progress in the past month!
P.S.: We'll be dropping a new Adventure batch tomorrow, as we start our new pace of 10 days per Adventure batch. As usual each batch consists of 5 Grammar Lessons, 1 Unlocks Batch, and 1 Reading Exercise.
We're so close to finishing N3! Can you believe it?
Time for the first MaruMori Wrapped! View your statistics of the past year!
Happy New Year everyone!
To start off strong, we're releasing our first MaruMori Wrapped today!
Now you might be wondering, what exactly is MaruMori Wrapped? Simply put, it's your study year of 2024 in review!
You'll find some cool statistics of what you've learned, mastered, and done on MaruMori in the past year, and also get a nice little summary of those stats at the end.
I think it's easier to explain through images, so here are a few samples:
We hope you enjoy seeing your year in review! Be sure to share your summary with us all too! We have a nice new channel in the MM Discord where you can show off your awesome stats!
Now, for our own little wrapped over at MM HQ (courtesy of Jesse):
2024 was a year of challenges, growth, and exploration for all of us at MaruMori. We watched our community grow substantially and dutifully chipped away at our ever-present monolith of content and features. We’re eternally thankful for all of our new users, old users, lifetimers, and trial explorers. You are the reason we do what we do.
That being said, we still have a lot left to accomplish, and in many ways, it feels like MM is still just getting started. We remain (for the moment) a minnow in the unbelievably large koi pond of Japanese learning resources, and sometimes it feels like we’re about to get sucked down the proverbial drain. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge how supportive our community has been, and continues to be. We sincerely appreciate all of your efforts to spread the good word of Maru, and we hope to continue being your dream resource for Japanese!
So, a huge heartfelt thank you, and happy new year from all of us at MM!
Looking ahead, things are looking pretty great for 2025! We’ll be done with our N3 content in Q1, and (as I’m sure anyone who’s peeked at the new roadmap knows) we’ve got a ton of exciting features on the docket. Another big thing to note is that starting in January, we’ll be increasing our content release pace, and dropping a batch of content every 10 days, instead of 14. Each batch will still contain five grammar lessons, their grammar srs points, a reading exercise, and an unlock batch. So you’ll still be getting the same amount of content, just faster!
2024年は皆さんに大変お世話になりました！来年もどうぞよろしくお願いします！2025年がMMファミリーの皆さんにとって素敵な年になりますように。よいお年を! 
The 2024-2025 Holiday Sale is live!
Hey all!
I've got exciting news for those of you who have been waiting for this!
Our annual holiday lifetime sale has begun on both MaruMori and Kitsun. This means that you can get lifetime accounts on both platforms individually for a great price, and that you can get them both bundled together for an even better price!
Be sure to look at https://marumori.io/billing if you are interested in getting MM or the bundle.
If you wish to get just Kitsun, check out https://kitsun.io/payment for that.
Last year when making this same announcement, we announced that we'd be rolling out N3 grammar from January onwards. As I make this announcement, I'm pleased to say that we're well on track to finishing N3 at the end of March! This means we'll most likely be starting N2 in April! A pretty good pace I'd say! Big thanks to our content team for always slaving away at bringing you the best grammar content available!
For all other upcoming content, features, and release schedules you can of course check the renewed roadmap for 2025 and beyond! 2025 will be awesome for MaruMori, and hopefully, that means it will be awesome for you too!
Hope you all have a great holiday!