Word familiarity levels

New, Learning, Familiar, Known, Mastered, Ignored: what they mean in the product.

The six levels

Valo Reader tracks every word token across six ordered familiarity levels. Your goal is to move words from left to right as you encounter them in context:

  1. New — The word has been tokenized but you have not interacted with it yet. It appears in the text but has no study history.
  2. Learning — You have tapped the word or encountered it in a quiz. The system knows you are actively working on it.
  3. Familiar — You have demonstrated recognition across a few encounters. The word is becoming comfortable.
  4. Known — You regularly answer correctly for this word. It is part of your active vocabulary.
  5. Mastered — The system considers the word learned. Standard quizzes stop selecting it so quiz time can focus on words that still need work.
  6. Ignored — You have explicitly chosen to skip this word. It stays out of quiz rotations and learning counts.

How promotion works

Promotion between levels can happen in two ways:

  • Manual promotion — When you open a word details popover or dialog, you can adjust its level directly. Use this when you recognize a word immediately and want to skip ahead.
  • Automatic promotion — Quiz performance and repeated successful encounters can nudge a word upward automatically. The exact thresholds vary and are designed to err on the side of keeping words in earlier stages longer rather than promoting prematurely.

Ignored words

The Ignored level is useful for proper nouns, names of characters or places, and noise tokens that are not worth studying. Ignored words:

  • Do not appear in quiz rotations
  • Are excluded from vocabulary count stats
  • Still appear in the text and can be inspected by tapping

You can unignore a word at any time, which returns it to its previous level.

Cross-story vocabulary

Vocabulary state is per-language and shared across all stories. If you mark a word as Familiar while reading one story, it is already Familiar when you encounter it in another story in the same language. Your vocabulary picture accumulates naturally as you read more.

The stats navigation shows high-level counts for some buckets, giving you a quick sense of how many words are in each stage. For detailed charts and trends over time, open the Stats dashboard.