Word familiarity levels

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

The six levels

Valo Reader tracks each study token across six familiarity statuses. Your goal is to move words from left to right as you encounter them in context:

  1. New — Use this status for a token you have not started studying yet. It appears in the text but has no saved familiarity status or study history.
  2. Learning — Use this when you first encounter a word and want to start learning it.
  3. Familiar — Use this when you recognize the word but may still struggle to recall some details.
  4. Known — Use this when you are reasonably confident you know the word well but have not fully internalized it yet. Known tokens count toward your known-word totals.
  5. Mastered — Use this when you can recall the word easily and no longer struggle with it. 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

You can change a status 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.
  • Quiz result actions — After a quiz, a correct answer can offer Promote, while an incorrect answer or “I don't know” can offer Demote. You choose whether to apply the change; quiz answers do not silently change a word's status.

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 change an ignored word to any other available status at any time. The app does not preserve a separate previous status for it.

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.