v0.18.0 Is Coming

On Sunday, October 11, 2026, I will update Elephant to 0.18.0.

Last time I promised two things: an announcement before the rollout, and a faster rollout. This is the first one. Let’s see how the second one goes, as many things need to be regenerated due to the changes.

During that time, Elephant may be unavailable or slow.

As promised in the 0.17 post, this release is about:

Grammar

From 0.18 onwards Elephant will use the standard curriculum grammar recommendation by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL). In addition, I kept a few rules as extensions, as I believe they are useful for lookups.

• Negation: 안, 못
• Passive & causative: -이/-히/-리/-기 passives, -이/-히/-리/-기/-우/-추 causatives, -되다
• Honorific vocabulary: 드시다, 계시다, 주무시다, 뵙다, 말씀…
• Particles: 아/야 (vocative), -씩, 끼리
• Expressions: -는 덕분에, -다 보니(까), -다 보면, -는지/-(으)ㄴ지

(It’s not that they aren’t part of the standard curriculum, they just may not be classified as grammar or be mixed in with other rules.)

For Elephant’s own quality control I created a dataset for grammar classification. The quality of the dataset is not great yet, so it won’t be published anytime soon. These things take a lot of time.

Grammar Catalogue

The visible part: there is now a grammar catalogue, similar to a dictionary. This also includes a rework of the grammar selector in the profile.

You can search and filter all grammar points by category and level, and find example sentences from Elephant’s corpus.

Like the dictionary, it is available to everyone.

Studying Grammar

If you find a grammar point you want to practice, you can add it to your studies directly from the catalogue. Course lessons now show the grammar points they cover, and a grammar point that appears several times is grouped into one card.

Grammar practice sessions also show the feedback on your last answer before jumping to the summary.

Smaller Things

There is also a long list of fixes and smaller improvements, among them:

• Flashcards: Updated to FSRS 4.5 and fixed a bug in the calculation.
• A few Accessibility improvements.
• Practice: Hopefully no more duplicate answer choices, numbers shouldn’t advance after a single correct answer, and dates should be generated correctly.
• Accounts: Sessions should now extend automatically for some time. This will mostly help me.
• Blog: You can now leave comments under blog posts, like this one! Or subscribe via RSS (I heard some people like that).

What’s Next?

I’m planning a bigger post for Elephant’s roadmap; that should be next.

Overall, the next step is making everything easier to use, better integrated, and easier to pick up for new learners.

I hope you’ll like the changes. I am looking forward to your feedback.

David