Learner’s Packs would a broad theme/topic to it such as “Japanese” “Chinese” “Java Script” or anything that requires multiple decks to learn and would indicate which decks, in which order, and at which speed (lessons per day) they are recommended by the Kitsun on-boarding team/experienced learners and would be part of the on-boarding experience. It would essentially be a more tidy version of the current “Featured Decks” section of the Community Center.
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Hmm. So for example, you may have the 10k, prefectures, names, and katakana decks for Japanese, while indicating that the 10k should be the main focus, with the others being taken when one is more advanced?
While I agree it would be better to have things other than a broad “featured,” it may be best to divide it up a bit more, into a “Kitsun Path” along with other popular decks.
For example, with Japanese, it depends on the user’s goals. To take a couple examples, the WK level 61-70 deck or the Genki deck wouldn’t have a place in Kitsun specific path, but still have a bunch of utility for people depending on what else they are using for Japanese.
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Maybe something as simple as ‘novice, intermediate, advanced’ or difficulty rating could help a lot too. When I started, I could barely touch Kitsun…just didn’t have the time. Since finishing WK, my time allocation is entirely different now. I know just looking through, our short-term goals seem to be quite different but anything to help the on-boarding experience is sure to help the platform. I tend to prefer options to make my own decision on what to do but that takes some time to determine. However, something like WK there is no thought other than pace (you just do the levels) and they have success with the simplicity though it’s very binding. I think displaying the variety of how the system can be used may be its greatest asset and now that it’s expanding to other languages, the sky is the limit on Kitsun. So just hearing how a variety of users made use of Kitsun like you said, someone might say ‘hey, that’s what I want to do’ given wherever they are at in the language journey.
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I think having general paths/packs would be a fantastic idea, but relatively difficult in execution if we want it to fit the user. Kitsun users come in with different levels of knowledge and available time, especially when you further divide it by learning aspect. For Japanese some people come from WK and know a lot of Kanji but are still shaky in vocabulary, while for others it might be reversed, or they might be complete beginners.
I think the above mentioned difficulty rating could help already, but it might need to be specific per aspect (vocabulary, grammar, listening, kanji) for languages like Japanese.
Of course, there’s always a possibility for having “beginner -> master” kinda packs where we just suggest deck A, B and C and let the user decide if they wish to start with those. At some point we’d like Kitsun to be a platform where it can take you from beginner to mastery in a subject, either through community decks or Kitsun official decks, but that’s obviously a very ambitious goal 
We (as a team nowadays 
) are very aware of the very lacking onboarding experience so most of our recent efforts have been going into improving that.
The Knowledge Base with FAQ articles will be going live this weekend probably. Onboarding tutorials (on-site widgets) have also been written and will be implemented soon if time allows (I really need to get back to the mobile apps development as well…).Next to that we have a big bunch of starter decks coming in for ~20 languages and will be focusing on creating high quality decks for a select few languages soon.
While unrelated to the topic, the known words system that will probably go live this weekend will hopefully also lessen the friction for users with existing knowledge as they can easily hibernate duplicates or already known words with that feature.
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