Study guide

Tokori is opinionated about how you learn a language. The app's features — vocabulary, reader, tutor, journal, flashcards — are not a toolbox you assemble at random. They're four pillars meant to be used together, weighted differently as you progress. This page is the single source of truth for those principles. The Learning Journey tab, the AI coach, and the dashboard widgets all reference what's written here.

The four pillars

Every productive study session belongs to one of these. The mix changes as you progress, but the categories don't.

1. Review (SRS)

Spaced-repetition flashcard sessions. Words you've saved from chat, the reader, or imports get scheduled by FSRS-5 and shown back to you at the moment they're about to be forgotten. This is the floor of your vocab — without it, words you "knew" yesterday quietly slip away.

• In-app surface: Flashcards tab (Vocab Recall, Sentence Mining, Anki Classic, KaniWani).
• Recommended cadence: every day you study. Even five minutes clears that day's due queue at small word counts.

2. Input (immersion + reading)

Reading and listening to native target-language content with the intent to understand. The reader, the library (textbooks, articles, imported books), podcasts, video — anything where you're consuming real language. Click-to-define lets you turn unknown words into vocab without breaking flow.

• In-app surface: Reader, Library, Click-to-define popover in chat.
• Off-app: anything you log via the Activity timer (podcast, video, conversation).

3. Tutor (guided practice)

Active back-and-forth with the AI tutor. The chat tab brings every configured provider to a single interface; the click-to-define popover and the per-card "Ask AI" surface bring the tutor inside the flashcard loop. The tutor knows your vocab, your level, and your recent reading, so its replies stretch you at the right edge of your ability.

• In-app surface: Conversation tab, the per-card Ask AI drawer, the click-to-define popover.

4. Output (production)

Writing or speaking in the target language. Journal entries get sentence-by-sentence correction. Voice mode (where available) gets the tutor speaking back at you. Production is the slowest pillar to ramp up but the one that turns recognition into recall.

• In-app surface: Journal tab (writing), Voice mode in chat (speaking).

The level score

Tokori derives your current level from a single number:

score = vocab_known + 1.5 × min(immersion_hours, 1500)

Where:

• vocab_known is the count of cards at status mastered (the FSRS scheduler has decided they're learned).
• immersion_hours is the total time logged across every kind of study session (review, reader, tutor chat, journal, off-app activities).
• The hour multiplier (1.5) reflects that an hour of varied immersion is worth roughly 1.5 words of "passive" knowledge — a smoothing factor borrowed from the Refold model.
• The cap at 1500 hours is a sanity bound: at that point your level is dominated by your real vocabulary, not by clocked time.

In plain language: vocab is your floor; immersion is what makes that vocab stick. A learner with 2,000 known words and 100 hours of immersion is a more rounded HSK 3 than one with 2,000 words and zero immersion — the latter knows definitions but hasn't seen the words in real prose.

The recommended mix

The four pillars aren't equal at every stage. Roughly:

Phase	Review	Input	Tutor	Output
Early (HSK 1-2 / N5-N4 / A1)	60%	30%	10%	0%
Building (HSK 3 / N3 / A2-B1)	35%	45%	15%	5%
Consolidating (HSK 4-5 / N2 / B2)	20%	50%	20%	10%
Fluency (HSK 6+ / N1 / C1-C2)	10%	55%	20%	15%

These are percentages of study time, not of activity count. The Learning Journey's AI coach uses this matrix to spot imbalance — if you've spent five hours this week on review and zero on input at HSK 3, expect a nudge.

The mix is a starting point, not a prescription. Heritage learners ramp output earlier; exam-focused learners stay heavy on review longer; learners aiming for travel proficiency lean tutor + listening. Override freely, set your own goals in the Goals panel, mark milestones complete manually.

Habits, goals, milestones — three motivational shapes

These overlap, but they hit different cognitive surfaces:

• Habit (daily / weekly minutes) — keeps the streak alive. Optimised for "show up consistently". Wires into the dashboard's streak chip and the consistency heatmap.
• Goal (vocab count / minutes / sessions by a deadline) — optimised for "ship a concrete result by date X". Wires into the pace indicator (ahead / on / behind).
• Milestone (a target level on your scale) — optimised for "I am somewhere on a longer journey". Surfaced as the Journey tab's ladder.

Use one, two, or all three. The dashboard surfaces each separately so they don't crowd each other.

Manual override is sacred

Tokori suggests; the user decides. Every recommendation in this guide — the activity mix, the level ladder, the AI coach's nudges, the suggested habits — can be overridden. If you study with a private tutor and don't need flashcards, hide the Flashcards tab. If your goal is HSK 4 in eighteen months and the journey says that's unrealistic, change the date and override the milestone. The app's job is to surface the most likely next step; your job is to know if that step is actually right for you.

Where each pillar lives

Pillar	Surface	Notes
Review	Flashcards tab	FSRS-5 scheduler. Run daily.
Input	Reader, Library, podcast/video logs	Click-to-define everywhere.
Tutor	Chat, Ask-AI drawer, click-to-define popover	Provider-agnostic.
Output	Journal, Voice mode	Journal gives sentence-by-sentence corrections.
All four	Activity timer	Logs every kind so the mix is measurable.

The Learning Journey tab knits all of this together: where you are on your scale, how the four pillars stack against the recommended mix, what the coach suggests doing next, which habits would lock in the pace you want.