Results from the recommender corpus
What actually happens as you read?
The most useful results from simulating Japanese reading in order, with recurring vocabulary allowed to become familiar during the work.
The main results
Coverage staircases
The first 30% is the real wall
A cold difficulty number can badly misrepresent the later majority of a long visual novel. Compare the same learner before reading and after its first third.
Actionable sequences
Three routes through the VN staircase
Compare three optimized paths from knowing the 500 most common VN words to knowing 80% of the top 10,000: a smooth climb, a middle ground balancing readability with major titles, and a deep-end route that prioritizes major titles.
How the simulations work
The simulator walks through each indexed work in sentence order. Counted vocabulary encounters must satisfy both a sighting threshold and a page-spacing threshold. This lets the simulations distinguish the difficulty of entering a work from the difficulty of continuing it after its recurring vocabulary has appeared several times.
Use your own vocabulary in the recommender.
The examples on these pages use synthetic starting vocabularies for comparison. The app can replace them with your reading history, Anki cards, built-in SRS deck, and manually known words.