You joined the beta. We didn't slow down.

The past ten days have been a whirlwind…

shipping fixes, listening to feedback, and folding in new layers. Not small tweaks. Real, substantive upgrades to the way Kumi grades your answers and how it handles Japanese input. Every day the ecosystem is evolving, and largely thanks to your input.

Here's what's landed since you got in.

First: answer grading is smarter now. Kumi used to be pretty rigid about English translations, one accepted answer, and anything else was wrong. That's gone. The app now reads what you actually mean and grades accordingly. "Close" answers get acknowledged as close. Right answers snap through faster than before.

Second: Japanese typing got a full rebuild. Mixed-script words…

the ones that blend kanji, hiragana, and katakana in a single compound, now compose correctly. This one's been bugging us for a while. It's fixed.

Both are in our testing environment, and ready to use.

We've spent the last several weeks building a grammar library from scratch. Over a thousand grammar patterns, each with multiple example sentences, reading guides, difficulty levels, and a map of how each pattern connects to the ones you should learn before or after it, and much more.

It's going through a final review pass right now by a credentialed linguist before it comes into the ecosystem.

When it lands, grammar in Kumi won't just be a separate study mode. It'll be woven into the same review system that already knows your vocab and kanji, so the app can start making connections between what you've learned and how those pieces fit together grammatically.

More on this soon.

We want to say something directly: the beta community has been remarkable.

The feedback you've brought…

honest, specific, direct…

is exactly what we needed. You told us which example sentences had the wrong furigana. You noticed where the grading was unfair. You tested flows we hadn't thought to test. Real things in the ecosystem got better because of what you shared in Discord.

We’re really fortunate to have passionate people invested in solving the problems of learning Japanese share their thoughts and experiences with us.

If you haven't joined the Discord yet: discord.gg/learnkumi. That's where we're talking through all of this in real time.

As you keep using Kumi, here's where your input lands hardest.

We're not asking for feature wishlists right now. We're asking you to think like someone who's already paying for this. Through that lens:

What's the thing that makes you close the tab? Not the polish feedback. The friction. The moment where your energy drops and you stop.

Nothing else tells us as much as that does.

A year from now, what do you want to be able to do in Japanese that you can't do today?

— The Kumi Team