"How am I doing?" is a hard question for a Japanese learner. Hours studied doesn't answer it. Words seen doesn't answer it. Even a big streak only tells you that you showed up.
Cotobara's dashboard is built around one question — how close am I to being ready for this JLPT level? — and everything on it is there to answer that. Here's how to read it.
Closer Than Yesterday: JLPT readiness
The centrepiece is a stacked bar for each JLPT level, N5 through N1, splitting that level's vocabulary into:
- Mastered — words that have climbed high enough in the SRS that you reliably know them.
- Learning — started, still in progress.
- Not started — the road ahead.
- Skipped at onboarding — words below the starting level you chose.
- Excluded (rare) — words your rare-word filter is holding back.
Those last two matter for honesty. If you told Cotobara to start you at N3, your N5 bar is not going to fill up, and it shouldn't pretend the gap is progress you haven't made — nor should it show you a scary red bar for words you deliberately skipped. They get their own segments so you can see exactly what you chose.
Each level also breaks down by frequency tier, which is the more useful readiness signal. The JLPT doesn't test a level's vocabulary uniformly — common words carry far more weight than obscure ones. Being at 60% of a level, weighted toward the frequent half, is a much stronger position than 60% spread evenly. Click through any segment and you land in the vocabulary browser filtered to exactly those words.
The weekly accuracy ring
A ring showing your rolling seven-day accuracy, colour-coded:
- 90% or above — green. You have room to go faster.
- 80–90% — navy. The sweet spot.
- Below 80% — red. You're outrunning your retention.
It's an item-level number, and it's strict: a word counts as correct only if you got both its cards — recognition and production — right without a slip.
The ring also nudges. Above 90%, it suggests raising your daily new-word limit. Below 80%, it suggests lowering it, or drilling your recent mistakes first if your pace is already at the minimum. Between 80 and 90 it says nothing on purpose — that's where you want to be, and an app that nags you inside the target band is just noise. Nudges only appear once you've done enough reviews that week for the number to mean anything.
This is the single most useful number on the page. Words learned measures ambition; accuracy measures what you actually kept.
Your review schedule
A bar chart of what's coming: today broken down hour by hour, then the next several days. Click a day to drill into its hours.
Two things to use it for. First, planning — if 40 reviews land at 6pm, you know what your evening looks like. Second, and more useful, spotting a pile-up before it lands. A schedule that shows a spike three days out is telling you that a burst of new lessons is about to come due all at once, while there's still time to ease off.
Streaks, and the honest way to count them
The streak card counts consecutive days you studied, in your local timezone — so "today" means today where you are, not on a server somewhere.
One deliberate design choice: today not being done yet doesn't break your streak. A streak that shows as broken at 9am, before you've had a chance to study, is punishing you for not having done the day yet. The day only counts against you once it's actually over.
Streaks are motivating, and they're also the metric most easily gamed. A 200-day streak of three cards a day is worth less than 60 days of real sessions. Treat it as a habit tracker, not a progress measure — that's what the readiness bars are for.
Needs attention, and newly unlocked
Two word lists that bracket your learning:
- Needs attention — the words you've missed most. These are your leeches: the handful that quietly consume a disproportionate share of every session. Usually they need an explanation rather than another rep, or they're two similar words interfering with each other.
- Newly unlocked — what you've learned in the last couple of days. The satisfying one. It's also a good sanity check that the words arriving are ones you actually want.
Tap any word for its full entry without leaving the dashboard.
Memory Library
A row of tiles showing how your vocabulary is distributed across the SRS stages — New, Learning, Familiar, Known, Mastered.
Watch the shape over months, not days. Early on it's front-loaded into New and Learning. As you keep going, weight shifts right, and words start retiring into Mastered where they stop costing you anything. A collection that's still overwhelmingly New after months usually means the daily new-word limit is too high and words are cycling back down instead of climbing.
What to actually check
Most days you don't need any of this — do your reviews and close the tab. But once a week it's worth thirty seconds:
- Is weekly accuracy in the 80–90% band? If not, adjust your daily new-word limit. That one change fixes most study problems.
- Is the schedule about to spike? Ease off new lessons for a couple of days if so.
- What's in "needs attention"? Open two of them and read the breakdown.
Start for free and watch your first level start filling in. See also: the full feature tour and how long it takes to pass N3.