What is Mastery?

In Kumi, mastery is how well you know a single concept, scored from 0 to 100. It is not one flat number pulled from thin air. It is built from every way you can actually know that concept, and it moves only as you show you know them.

Mastery is measured per concept. Each word, kanji, radical, and grammar point has its own mastery score, and those scores are what your KMT in each domain is built from.

You might recognize a word on sight but blank when you try to say it yourself. That's why Kumi tracks reading, producing, listening, and writing separately, then combines them into the concept's overall mastery.

This is why Kumi can tell the difference between a word you vaguely recognize and one you can actually use. A plain flashcard app collapses all of that into one pass-or-fail. Kumi keeps them distinct, so your score reflects how you know something, not just whether you have seen it.

Every review feeds mastery with more than whether you got it right. Kumi also weighs how quickly you answered and whether the review was on schedule. A fast, genuine recall on a review that was actually due counts fully. Answering slowly, or cramming the same card over and over off schedule, barely moves the needle.

It also builds confidence over time. One right answer doesn't prove much. A track record of well-timed reviews does. So your mastery reflects not just that you were right once, but that you can be right reliably.

Because each way of knowing a concept is measured separately, you cannot reach full mastery by drilling one easy angle. To max out a concept, you have to show you know it several ways. Marking something known or importing it from Anki gives you a head start, but it is a starting guess with no track record behind it, and your real reviews quickly confirm or correct it.

As a concept's score climbs, it passes through five stages:

• Novice. Just introduced. Expect misses.
• Beginner. Starting to stick, with real gaps.
• Developing. Most reviews land, but it isn't solid yet.
• Advanced. Strong and reliable across most ways of knowing it.
• Master. Deep, well-rounded command of the concept.

Mastery reflects what you know now, so it fades if you stop reviewing, the way real memory does. The longer a concept goes untouched, the more its score drifts down, and a well-timed review brings it back up. The more history a concept has, the more slowly it fades, because Kumi trusts a long track record more than a single lucky answer. This is the whole point of reviews: they keep your mastery honest.

Your KMT in a domain is built from the concepts you have mastered in it. Each tier holds a set of concepts; as you learn and hold on to them, you clear the tier and unlock the next. Mastery is the close-up, per-concept view, and KMT is the per-domain view of the same progress.