掲示板 Forums - [In development] Fall/Winter 2025 Feature - Study Groups

Current status: in development!

I received inspiration from the Book Club that "meets" weekly in our discord server. It's a loosely-knit group of learners who come together on their own time to read books, discuss what they read, and study the words on renshuu via public word lists. So, here's my idea:

Study Groups

What are they? They would be pages within renshuu that you could subscribe to and be a member of. Study groups be built around any theme or goal: it might be a group reading a particular book, studying for a test (or even a class at a school), or fans of a singer/manga/game/whatever!

Expected features

1. A communal set of lists (pruned from the Community Lists) for materials that benefit that group. I think I could even work on a new feature that would allow multiple people to add/remove from the same list (with permission levels for users)

2. Public groups (in order to minimize moderation tasks, there will be no private groups. I plan to allow groups with restricted membership, but the content of any group will be for all to enjoy. After all, we're all here to learn!

3. Group-specific discussion board for talking about related topics, asking questions, etc.

4. Group-specific daily challenges and/or kao garden quests! These could be "built" by the admin of the group to tie into whatever the group is doing (although there would be hard, global limits on how much you could get from group reward to prevent abuse of the system)

5. "Private" versions of Question Corner, etc. to run within your group.

It always makes me happy to see so many people talk about how much they love the community in renshuu, and I'm hoping we can come up with something here that could help you all interact more, motivate one another, and be happier in your learning journey.

Want to run a study group?

We are currently taking applications for study groups in the upcoming testing period. Please submit your application here!

As they will be public, the focus will be on Japanese learning, so general topics of conversation will be discouraged and sent back to the main forums.

The main goal is to help others study and learn better. I see these groups as acting as ways to help gather materials to help with studying a topic/theme, and to help with motivation sure to the other elements in renshuu, peer support/feedback, etc.

At the same time, as sole developer and maintainer of renshuu, I do not want to make renshuu bigger than it needs to be, as I will not be able to maintain and moderate it properly.

So to take your anime example - that's a great focus for a study group. However, I would like to encourage a group of learners (and not just a group of fans). So, I would like to structure it to *focus* on the learning- the shared study materials, group goals, kao-garden quests, etc.

If there are a lot of groups that, however, do not show any signs of studying together, and just get together to discuss the show, share memes, pics, etc., then I feel that would be a better community for elsewhere.

I hope this clarification makes sense. I think the format of the study group page will be an essential part in determining how the groups will act, which is why I want a lot of discussion ahead of time to help make it ideal for learners.

If there could be functionality for the group admin to see how group members are studying on the site (ie a teacher could potentially assign homework on Renshuu and be able to check at least completion of quizzes etc), I'm in!

This sounds interesting but specifically in regards to what you refer to as how members are studying? From the top of my head I could think of: being able to see the learning/review statistics correlating with every other group member; people could check out who in the group are currently making progress towards any group-specific daily challenges and/or kao garden quests as a way to know who are participating in those; people could check out who in the group are using any of the group list and which ones; statistics based on group lists usage.

My main question is what will end up not getting created/improved in Renshuu in order to build this out?

There are things I'd rather see in Renshuu than this. The ideas mentioned here are things I personally have no interest in and wouldn't be helpful to me personally.

I swear, I am not trying to just be a downer here. I LOVE renshuu sooo much. This is the best app I've ever used and it keeps me motivated every single day. I feel this way even though I don't really use the community features much.

Personally, I'd much rather see things like:

• more games, such as more counting system help (e.g., a quiz where the date, time, counter etc is spoken).
• graded reading materials (like 1-2 paragraphs at a time) to help practice reading comprehension.
• more garden features to purchase (I love growing trees through my progress, that's so motivating to me).

But...I admit that all of those involve creating actual new content which might actually be a way bigger task that creating an environment where the community just supports each other (i.e., no new content, just structural changes?).

I also acknowledge that I might be very much in the minority opinion here!

that’s a cool really cool idea I vote for this too

I think study groups would be awesome, and I absolutely think severely limiting what they can do is also good, actually.

I can make a Dragon Quest group, and have lists on like “UI words” “Monster Names” “DQ9 plot-related words” and especially if I can add the example sentences to be actual lines from the game, that would own.

But then as far as “forums” goes, I think just a question corner, and then two threads/forums/etc: one 英語で、one in Japanese, the English one to be like “I’m playing DQ11, and they are using 儀式 a lot and I can’t find a good translation for it. What does this mean?” Sort of questions, and the Japanese one can be normal forum random discussion! Just in Japanese, to practice!

Like it’s one thing to talk about Dragon Quest with fans, but you can do that on Discord. Being able to do it _in Japanese_? That sounds like it would be awesome.

Like in my mind the main draw is the curated lists and goals and quests and all that. It definitely doesn’t need to be a fanpage.

Maybe I don't quite understand. But it seems like fan discussion would be good as long as it takes place in japanese. I saw the lists as being terms common to the topic. And a way to help people start trying to engage with the topic in japanese.

For example, if the manga topic was One Piece then part of the word list might be mugiwara (which I think is 麦藁) and a common nickname villains call the protagonist. This would help people start to be able to read the source material by addressing the words the community thinks are important to know going in.

one problem that might be run into is spoilers if general discussion is allowed, which may stop people who are not caught up with the media of a topic from entering. On the bright side, bigger series like One Piece means there is a lot of material for practice.

Someone also mentioned topics for people near the same level, so maybe that could be integrated into sub topics like lists for important words regarding each volume of a manga or each season of an anime.

That makes a lot of sense -- that's a lot for you to consider and I think you've done a great job at that so far! Helpful to have the additional context (and to know graded readers will never be a thing here, which I totally get!). I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next!