MaruMori Knowledge Base

Why don't you offer EN -> JP SRS options?

Do you have English > Japanese flashcards?

Unfortunately, we do not!

There are a couple of big reasons why we don't think that English -> Japanese SRS is optimal:

1. Synonyms

English -> Japanese seems nice when you first start out, and only know one Japanese word for each equivalent word in English. But as you will soon find out, Japanese has many, many ways to express the same concept.

This leads to the synonym issue, where it becomes extremely difficult to correctly prompt for a given word.

Let's take the example of an E -> J card with a front side of "many; a lot". There's no way to tell whether we're asking you for 「たくさん」, 「多い」, 「たいぶ」, 「ぎょうさん」, 「うんと」, 「大量」,... and the list goes on.

Not only does this mean that it would be impossible to know which word we're prompting you for, it would also be impossible for us to prompt you for the specific word we want you to learn. Not ideal!

2. We want you to form a "Japanese brain"

The sooner you get away from translating between English and Japanese in order to output, the better!

This isn't as big of a deal on a word-to-word basis, but when it comes to forming sentences, going from English -> Japanese will almost always leave you with an unnatural, if not incorrect, result.

Japanese -> English flashcards still ask you to form a connection between X Japanese word and Y English approximation, but they are the lesser of two evils as they:

• 

  Train your brain to start reading and recognizing Japanese first

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  Serve as a stepping stone for you to transition to Japanese -> Japanese later in your studies

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  Save you time (could you imagine drilling not only "reading" and "meaning" for kanji vocabulary, but also a third English -> Japanese card for every item ?!)

3. Your time is valuable!

Learning another language is a lot of work, and Japanese in particular has a lot going on. Complex grammar, mountains of vocab, and, of course, kanji .

We want you to hit your Japanese goals in an at least somewhat timely manner, and so potentially adding a third type of card for kanji vocabulary items (on which you are already tested for both reading and meaning) is something we'd like to avoid if possible.

That being said...

Everyone learns differently! Maybe you've tried both, and you've made it quite far in your Japanese studies, and you just know that English -> Japanese works for you. Or maybe you like your reviews to be a combination of both! That's fine too.

Unfortunately, we don't have any plans to add Japanese -> English SRS to MaruMori for now, but luckily, there are plenty of other great tools out there that will allow you to do so (check out our sister platform, Kitsun.io , for a fully customizable SRS experience!).