Changelog
Stay up to date with all of the latest additions and improvements!
Come join our lovely Discord server!
Example Sentences with full breakdown tooltips, MaruMori Discord Bot and more!
Today's update brings you two big new features along with a few smaller improvements. Let's get into it!
Example Sentence & Full Breakdown Tooltips
As part of our work for the Grammar Library (likely also releasing this week!!) and Example Sentence Database we've added the first 400 or so Example Sentences to the dictionary pages.
Each sentence has a translation and a full breakdown of vocabulary, kanji, and grammar points used in the sentence. Just click anywhere on the Japanese text and it will show you exactly which vocabulary, kanji, grammar point, and even which conjugated form it is. From there you can also immediately add it to your personal study lists or go to the corresponding detail page.
Here's a small gif to show how it works!
Note that not every dictionary entry has example sentences yet. These are being added continuously as we keep curating sentences in our CMS. In the near future, we will likely add huge amounts of sentences and make it clear which ones are already checked/curated by us (to make sure they are correct and good to learn with), and which still have to be checked. More on that later!
MaruMori Discord Bot
We now have our very own MaruMori Discord bot! This bot is active on the MaruMori discord (come join us!) but can also be added to your own servers.
MaruBot has a few slash commands you can put in chat to do certain things:
/vocabulary & /kanji - This works exactly like the on-site dictionary search. You can put in any search prompt to search and then go through the results, with a handy button to immediately add them to your favorite study list. You can input English, kanji, kana, or romaji to search, just like at the regular MM dictionary search.
/share - This drops your customized profile image and a link to your profile page in the chat. This too requires you to link your account.
/verify - MM Discord Only - This command gives you your Lifetime/Early Panda roles on our Discord if you linked your Discord account to MM (on the settings page). There's also a role for when you have Kitsun Lifetime too!
/help - Show you an overview of commands with descriptions.
Next to this, MaruBot also gives you special roles if you react to the rules message with the corresponding buttons. These roles are used to keep you up to date with MM in whichever category you prefer (all announcements, important only, features only, content only)
We'll be expanding the functionality of MaruBot as we go (oh hey there, grammar point lookups), but it already gives you a quick way to search for anything and add the results to your personal study lists!
Other Improvements
We also have other smaller improvements in this update:
Modals - All modals now have a better color overlay in dark-theme.
SRS Reviews - Fixed an issue where mastered items showed up in reviews and review counts on other pages.
Achievements - All achievements now have descriptions!
Safari - Fixed an issue with Safari 16.4 on MacOS not scrolling after navigating from adventure pages.
New JLPT Study Lists, new features and new (art) teasers!
Hey! A new update went live bringing with it some new features, study lists, bugfixes, changes and new content. We've also got a few teasers of what's coming up! Let's dive into it:
New Content
We've published new JLPT Study Lists. Two for each JLPT Level (N5-N1). One for Kanji and one for Vocabulary. You can find them in the JLPT category of the premade study lists page (click on "Get More" on your study list page).
A new batch of Apprentice levels has been added according to our bi-weekly schedule. Meaning 5 new grammar lessons, 1 new unlocks batch and 1 new reading exercise are now available. Go get 'em!
New Features
Navigation - The nav bar has been reworked a bit to prepare for the addition of the Grammar Index. There is now a "Resources" dropdown where "Tools" used to be.
Dictionary - We now have a "start" page for the dictionary which shows you a few ways how you can search through MM's dictionary.
Bug Fixes
Dictionary - Details Page - No longer incorrectly shows a correct percentage of 100% when some conditions are met.
SRS Lessons - Fixed an issue with duplicate lessons.
Coming Up
The Grammar Index pages are ready to go! We're just working on the initial content for them. As soon as we have 20 grammar point breakdowns ready along with example sentences, we'll be putting it all live!
All items will already have a link to the corresponding grammar lesson if it exists, list related grammar, and possibly have example sentences linked to them, making it easy to look up where we explain a certain grammar point in detail, even if we might not have a breakdown for them in the grammar index yet. We'll be adding those in the coming weeks until we get to a point where we catch up with our current available grammar lesson content.
The new region (Jungle of Tenacity, aka N3) artwork is looking absolutely fantastic! Our Illustrator is now working on the animations and we've been figuring out a way to load in the whole region without crashing your phones. The new region will be 11x3 pieces of artwork, compare that to the N5 region (3x3) and you can probably imagine how big it is! 
Here's a new teaser!
Crossword Puzzles, new content, reworked kana drills and more!
Time for another update! This time we bring you a new minigame to help you train your vocabulary in a fun way.
Crossword Puzzles
That's right, you can now enjoy crossword puzzles in Japanese! They work as usual, except you must now answer in Japanese rather than English. This means you get an English prompt, which also trains you in a different aspect of learning than the usual SRS reviews do.
Here's an image to show you what it looks like:
Click on a tile to see the prompt (you can click multiple times in case there are multiple prompts for that tile) and its corresponding tiles get highlighted.
When you fill in an answer, it will show either red or green letters right away, indicating whether you answered correctly or wrongly:
Once all the tiles are green, you win and you can generate a new puzzle right away, or select a different difficulty level and give that a shot. That's right, infinite crossword puzzles!
As for difficulty levels, we currently have:
N5
N4
N3
N2
N1
MM Adventure unlock batches 1-10
MM Adventure unlock batches 11-20
With possibly more coming in the future (e.g. concept groups like animal names) 🤩
We've also made it so you can quit at any time and when you come back to the page (on the same browser), it will ask you if you want to continue your last session or generate a new puzzle.
Other things
As usual, the new batch of levels for the adventure regions also just went live. But we also sneaked in a few more small features and bugfixes:
New Features
The roadmap page now has status indicators indicating which points have been completed, which are currently being worked on, and which haven't been started yet.
The Kana Drills have been reworked! There are now multiple stages rather than one big session. Each question type now has its own stage, after which you have a small break and the next stage starts. This should make it feel a lot easier to work through.
Next to this, we're going to be removing the audio stage from the kana drill exercises in the first adventure region and make them shorter in general. If you still feel a bit shaky after doing them, you can always do more drills (including audio drills) by repeating the level or by going to the kana drills on the tools page.
Kana Drills - We've also added hotkeys for the multiple-choice answers! You can now press 1-2-3-4 to choose the corresponding answer.
Wordle - The hints layout has changed. It now also shows the remaining characters and had its order changed a bit.
Personal Synonyms & Notes Modal - Now displays which item you are editing.
Bugfixes:
SRS Lessons - Pressing the left-arrow hotkey at the first lesson no longer breaks the page.
SRS Lessons & Reviews - Lightning Mode button now registers your click/tap on the button, rather than only on the icon itself.
Sharing Your Profile Images, Social logins and more!
Hey all! It's been a lil while since the last update, but we certainly haven't been sitting still! We've got some cool new things for you.
Creating & Sharing Your Profile Images/Pages
Starting with the ability to customize and share your profile pages through links and generated images!
Here's an example of what such an image looks like:
And here's another one:
You can choose if you want your own banner image to display, or one of our presets. Next to that, you can select which stats you want to show off and whether you want to show your title and badges or not. Everything is customizable and we can't wait to see what you guys come up with 😊
You can access it through the "share profile" button on your profile page.
This also becomes the thumbnail image of your own profile page when you link it in other places like Discord, forums, social media, or anywhere else. You can copy the link it gives you after generating your custom image, or by going to "https://marumori.io/profile?username=<yourusernamehere>" Give it a shot!
Image Resizing
In tandem with this, we've also released a new system for image uploads. Whenever you upload a new image for your user account, it will now properly resize them once, rather than on the fly. This should result in much faster image load times and improved site performance.
Social Logins & Connections
You can now register, log in, and link your Google and/or Discord accounts. Linking your social account(s) to an existing MM account will then let you log in with a single click of the button. It also simplifies account registration for new users, as they can just click the button, authorize and go explore MaruMori.
In the coming period we will also be working on creating a Discord bot, which you can use to do Dictionary lookups on Discord, immediately add items to your study lists, share your progress or profile images, and more! If you are in the MM Discord you may have already seen it at work, as we now automatically post our task progress updates through the bot 
Other Changes
Not being logged in while exploring MM will now show a login button in the navbar.
Adventure - Conjugation Drills - Will now properly redirect you to the adventure region you came from after completion
Grammar Lessons & Reading Exercises - Clicking on "Next Lesson" will now properly scroll the page to the top on every browser (Firefox had issues).
Image uploads - Changing your header image or avatar will now properly update them visually too, without caching interfering.
What's next?
A lot! We're still working very hard on the Grammar Database, the Sentence Database, and Grammar SRS and making sure they all work together perfectly.
So far we've got the CMS and Backend side of things pretty much done, meaning that every Sentence gets tagged with the corresponding vocabulary, and kanji in it, then gets connected to a Grammar SRS item(s), which in turn are connected to Grammar Point(s).
We plan to have these Sentences turn up everywhere in MaruMori. From the Dictionary pages to Grammar SRS to the Grammar Lessons in Adventure, everything will be connected and show you exactly which vocabulary, grammar, and kanji are being used. If you are familiar with Kitsun's reading tool, it will work similarly, but go even further 
I hope to show it to you all real soon, stay tuned!
New Region Names and Bugfixes!
Time for another update! This time we've got the new names for the regions and a whole bunch of bugfixes.
Note that we're still working on replacing them in the actual grammar lesson content and such!
You can also already access a fun new feature from the profile page (see if you can spot it!), which we will be telling you all about in the next update!
New Features:
Our Regions now have their new and final names:
Introduction (PRE-N5) - Isle of New Beginnings
Elementary (N5) - Fledgling Forest
Apprentice (N4) - Depths of Devotion
Adept (N3) - Jungle of Tenacity
Advanced (N2) - Sands of Mastery
Expert (N1) - The Scorched Summit
Wordle - You can now click on the solution to go to the corresponding dictionary page for further information.
Wordle - We now show the English definition of the solution too.
Maintenance Mode - We've introduced a new maintenance mode for when we need to make large changes that require the site to be down for a little while (hopefully almost never!)
Profile - You can now hover over the badges to see their names.
Bugfixes:
Changelog - Loading newer items no longer sometimes scrambles the content.
Study List - Manage Items - Levels now correctly show up on tablet resolutions
Tooltips - Should no longer appear upside down sometimes, and also not keep their position incorrectly while scrolling the page.
Profile - Fixed an issue where line breaks would not work
Firefox - Fixed an issue where multiline text input no longer worked for firefox browsers
Social Notifications - No longer shows an incorrect date/time when someone else likes your comment or replies to it.
Profile - When you view someone else's profile page, it will no longer say "You did X", but rather their username.
Adventure - Fixed an issue where visiting the adventure page before logging in, then logging in would not fetch your region progress correctly.