About Kalmatu

The idea

Most beginners juggle a flashcard app, a textbook and, if they're lucky, someone to talk to. Kalmatu brings them together. You learn a word on a flashcard, meet it again in a grammar lesson, and use it in conversation, and anything new you pick up while talking is added back to your flashcards.

Flashcards

Each word in your vocabulary becomes two cards: from the language to English, and from English to the language. The two are scheduled separately, because recognising a word and recalling it are different skills.

Scheduling follows Anki's proven method. New cards go through short learning steps (1 and 10 minutes), then come back after a day, then at growing intervals. Rate a card Again, Hard, Good or Easy and the next interval adjusts to match. The study day starts at 4am in your time zone, with daily limits you can set.

• Hear words read aloud by your device's voices.
• Group words into decks, for example the words for next week's quiz, and study just those.
• Cram a deck before a test without disturbing your regular schedule.
• Use keyboard shortcuts on a computer, or swipe cards on a phone.

Grammar

Each language has a numbered A1 course. Every lesson stands on its own, with explanations, tables, translated examples, common mistakes and practice exercises whose answers stay hidden until you check. When you've read a lesson, practise it with the tutor, which sticks to that topic, corrects your mistakes and remembers where you left off.

• German: 22 lessons and 826 words, based on the Goethe-Zertifikat A1 (Start Deutsch 1).
• Russian: 20 lessons and 601 words, from the Cyrillic alphabet and stress to the six cases at a beginner level.
• Japanese: 22 lessons and 507 words, starting with hiragana and katakana and following the order of Genki I, lessons 1–8.

Writing Japanese

Japanese learners can see the stroke order of every hiragana, katakana and kanji, played stroke by stroke, then draw the character themselves. Trace over it at first, then write it from memory: each stroke is checked for its place, shape and direction as you draw, and a hint shows the next stroke if you're stuck. Practise the kana charts, the kanji in your own words, or any word you type. Stroke data comes from KanjiVG.

Conversation

Once you know ten words in a language, you can chat with an AI partner in it. Replies stream in as they're written, conversations are saved so you can reread them, and when you finish, Kalmatu picks out the new words you met and adds them to your vocabulary with translations and examples.

Words from your own reading

When you read in your language elsewhere on the web, you can look words up with Yomitan, a free pop-up dictionary for Chrome and Firefox. It shows which words are already in your vocabulary, and adds new ones to Kalmatu in one click, with the sentence you found them in as the example. Make a key in Settings to connect it; the steps are there too.

Measuring progress

Your home page shows how many cards are ready and how your known vocabulary has grown. A word counts as known once you've learned its card from the language into English.

Kalmatu can also estimate which CEFR band, from A0 to C1, the words you've actually practised represent. It's an estimate of vocabulary only, not a certificate or a measure of speaking, listening, reading or writing.

The AI tutor and your API key

Flashcards and grammar lessons work without any setup. The tutor, conversation practice and the vocabulary estimate run on OpenAI's models using your own OpenAI API key, which you add in Settings. Your key is used only for your own requests, and you can remove it at any time.

When you use those features, the messages you write and the relevant lesson or vocabulary are sent to OpenAI to produce a reply.

Your data

Your vocabulary, review history, conversations and grammar progress belong to your account. You can remove a language and everything studied in it, delete all of a language's vocabulary, or delete your account and all of its data from Settings.