What is KMT?

KMT, short for Kumi Mastery Tiers, is Kumi's own mastery system: a 1 to 10 scale that reflects how much of a domain you have actually mastered. A tier is not a chapter you are on, it is a measure of how deep you have gone, from the most common concepts at tier 1 to the rarest and most demanding at tier 10.

KMT is also tracked separately for every domain, so you never have one flat level. But before that, it is worth saying why Kumi built its own scale at all instead of leaning on the usual one.

JLPT levels, N5 through N1, are exam benchmarks. They measure whether you can already perform at a given level; they were never designed to tell you what to learn, or in what order. Yet most Japanese apps build their entire curriculum around JLPT levels and hand you those groupings as if they were the official source of truth for what to study.

Here's the part they leave out: the JLPT does not publish an official list of the kanji, vocabulary, or grammar it tests. The organization that runs it discontinued that specification after the 2010 revision, explaining that the goal of learning Japanese is to communicate, not to memorize vocabulary, kanji, and grammar items. So every so-called JLPT level list is an unofficial reconstruction: a best guess at a syllabus the test's own makers deliberately refuse to print, then packaged and sold to you as a curriculum.

KMT is our answer. Rather than reverse-engineering a list the JLPT never published, Kumi orders study by what is genuinely most common and useful, then by what you personally have and have not mastered, tracked separately in every domain. Kumi still covers everything the JLPT tests, KMT just sets the order and timing from your real progress instead of a guessed syllabus.

Because KMT measures real mastery, it is tracked independently for each domain. You have a tier for kana, radicals, kanji, kana vocabulary, kanji vocabulary, and grammar, all at once, and each one moves on its own. It is completely normal to be far ahead in one domain and just starting in another, and Kumi never hides that behind a single number.

Each tier in a domain holds a set of concepts, ordered so the most common and essential come first. As you learn the concepts in a tier, you clear it and unlock the next one in that domain, so your tier reflects how far through the domain you have worked.