MaruMori Knowledge Base

SRS (2) - Kanji and Vocabulary SRS

Kanji VS vocab items

On MaruMori, kanji items will show as green in your SRS lessons and reviews. Like so:

Meanwhile, vocabulary items will be blue , like this:

Note : Words in Japanese can be made up of single kanji, multiple kanji, only kana, or combinations of kanji and kana, like you see above! You'll learn more about these different writing systems throughout your studies!

Reading VS meaning

Kanji and vocabulary items have both meanings (semantic) and readings (phonetic). Which means you will need to answer both an item's meaning as well as its reading to do a complete review of an item.

Kanji meanings

Strictly speaking, kanji don't really have set meanings, (at least not English ones) and these are largely used as a tool, in combination with mnemonics (stories) to help you remember them, and connect them with their associated vocabulary.

You can see a given kanji's meanings here, in your lessons:

Kanji readings

Most kanji have at least two different possible readings. On MaruMori, we'll teach you our recommended reading, but we'll accept any valid reading in reviews .

You can see a kanji's readings here, in your lessons:

In your reviews...

You'll be quizzed on both an item's meaning and reading. We'll prompt you like this, using a yellow color for a kanji's meaning:

And a purple color for a kanji's reading:

Vocabulary meanings

These are simply a given Japanese word's English equivalent (or more like, approximation). Some items have more than one meaning, and we'll accept any valid meaning in your reviews.

Vocabulary readings

Most vocabulary items, with some exceptions, have one reading. (But, as usual, if there are other valid options, we'll accept all of them.)

In your lessons, you can see a given vocabulary item's readings here:

With the main reading highlighted in blue, and any optional readings in grey.

In your reviews...

Just like with kanji, you'll need to input both meaning and reading, with yellow indicating meaning:

And purple indicating reading:

Kana-only vocabulary items

Some vocabulary items are kana-only. (Most of these also have rare kanji forms, but no need to worry about those, to be honest!)

For these, you'll only be quizzed on meaning, since, provided you can read kana, you'll know how they are read just by looking at them!

E.g.