Most progress tracking answers "how much have you done". The Learning Lab answers "what do you actually know, and how do you know it" — by splitting a word into seven separate skills and reporting each one from what you have already done, rather than from a test.
Without a plan: Three of the seven skill facets
Pro adds: All seven
Facets follow the LEARNER being read, never the reader.
Watch: The Learning Lab
1 min 51 s · presented by Jason, Mandarin Temple's AI tutor
Captions are part of the picture, under Jason. The full transcript is below.
Read the transcript
- Hi, I’m Jason, Mandarin Temple’s AI tutor. This is the Learning Lab, shown on a demonstration account with four months of practice behind it.
- The Lab reads the practice you were doing anyway, and turns it into evidence of what you have actually learned.
- A progress bar counts what you have finished. The Lab asks something harder: what you can still recall, and how well.
- Each answer becomes one record. Records add up for every word, and a figure appears only when enough practice stands behind it.
- Knowing a word is really seven skills: its meaning, its character, its pinyin and tone, hearing it, saying it and writing it.
- Each card names the practice that fills it, so a thin facet tells you what to do next.
- On a free account, the Lab measures meaning, character and pinyin. Pro measures all seven, and adds the gap between recognising a word and producing it.
- Your profile starts with how you know what you know: a bar for each facet, with the margin of error the Lab allows itself.
- On Pro, the seven draw a shape. This one is stronger at recognising words than at saying or writing them.
- And where the evidence is thin, the Lab says so, rather than showing a number it cannot support.
- Every word in the dictionary has its own card as well: how you have done on that word, facet by facet.
- That’s the Learning Lab: seven ways of knowing a word, read from your own practice. Open yours and see what it says.
Open the video guide on its own page, with its key moments
Knowing a word seven ways
"I know 谢谢" hides seven different abilities, and most learners are strong in some and hollow in others without realising it. The Lab measures them separately:
- Meaning 义 — You know what it means. Built from reveal-mode flashcards and reading practice.
- Character 字 — You can pick the character out from meaning and sound. From lesson practice.
- Pinyin 拼 — You can produce the romanisation. From write mode on a flashcard, and the write step in a lesson.
- Tone 声 — You know which tone. From tones typed alongside pinyin, and tone drills on dictionary entries.
- Listening 听 — You recognise it spoken. From listening exercises and the listen step of a lesson.
- Speaking 说 — You can say it. From the speak step in a lesson, and pronunciation practice.
- Writing 写 — You can write it by hand. From handwriting practice, drawn and graded.
The other panels
- Recognising vs producing — The distance between what you can recognise and what you can say or write. On Pro, because it needs the Speaking and Writing facets.
- Your forgetting curve — How much you still recall as the gap since your last review grows — a day, a week, a month, three months — from your own flashcard reviews at real intervals.
- Calibration — Whether your confidence matches your accuracy. Over-confidence and under-confidence are different problems with different fixes.
- Task engagement stability — Whether your accuracy holds up across a sitting, and roughly when it starts to slip. A pattern in your answers, not a measure of attention.
- Errors — What your mistakes have in common — characters that look alike, tones 2 and 3 — so you see a pattern rather than a list of things you got wrong.
It is built from what you did
Nothing in the Lab is a separate test. Every figure comes from work you were doing anyway — flashcard grades, lesson practice, listening exercises, pronunciation attempts.
That is what makes it honest and also what makes it slow to fill. A brand-new account has an empty Lab, and the only way to populate it is to study across all seven kinds of activity.
How much of it you see
Three tiers: signed out shows none, a free account shows three facets, and either paid plan shows all seven — the four it adds are Tone, Listening, Speaking and Writing. Group figures — cohort medians and the like — are withheld below five learners, so a small class cannot be used to work out an individual.
One thing that catches people out: facet access follows the learner, not the viewer. A tutor on a paid plan looking at a learner on a free one sees that learner’s three facets, not seven. The Lab reports what the subject has paid for, which is the only version that does not sell someone else’s data.
What it never contains
The Lab is built from outcomes — right, wrong, how long, how confident. It does not store or show what you typed. Nothing you wrote to the AI tutor, no free-text answer and no message appears in any Lab panel, for you or for anyone looking at your profile.
And a teacher’s view of a learner is built from the learner’s own panels. There is nothing on a tutor’s screen about you that you cannot see about yourself.
Common questions
Because it is built from evidence and a new account has none. Do some flashcard review, a lesson’s practice section and a listening exercise, and the first facets appear.