What if I already know some Japanese? Can I skip content?

The Phases of NativShark do not correspond with the levels of proficiency used by other educators.

Accordingly, even intermediate and advanced students can learn quite a lot from Phase One.

If you’ve already learned some Japanese elsewhere and are starting with NativShark, we strongly recommend starting right from the beginning, in Phase One.

Skimming through lessons and making lots of use of the “archive” button on flashcards whenever something is familiar (keyboard shortcut “a”) will allow you to fill in the gaps in your knowledge quickly.

Gaps in knowledge

NativShark doesn’t correspond to how other resources use “beginner”, “intermediate”, “advanced” and similar terms to those.

Many things that are used in Japanese extremely commonly can be, for whatever reason, reserved for advanced students. Or never taught at all which leaves us lost when we leave our study environment.

For example, in Phase One alone, you learn 90% of all common conjugations seen in the Japanese language.

You also learn how to use Japanese in natural sentences which is unfortunately very different from how textbooks and many other resources teach you.

Most resources don’t even tell you that they aren’t teaching you an entire side of Japanese-- the side that is used in everyday life when talking to friends, family, coworkers, strangers you meet, the list goes on.

NativShark teaches this right from the start and fills in those gaps in your knowledge that you may not even realize you had.

Both Niko and I (Ty) experienced this when going through Phase One ourselves, and we both passed the JLPT N1 years ago. (Niko passed the N1 in 2014, and I passed it in 2019). It helped us naturally phrase things in relevant contexts.

Honestly, that’s one of the most difficult skills out there for us Japanese learners.

Phase One

Every NativShark Unit ends with a Dialogue.

Dialogues are a culmination of everything you learned in the Units up to that point and are meant to keep language you’ve learned in your head while offering new natural contexts in which to use it.

Here’s an example of the last Dialogue of Phase One:

Here’s the translation for it:

Definitely not the language you would expect to see in a beginner textbook.

But this language is used in real life all the time, and that’s why we teach it early when many other resources may have saved it for an intermediate level.

If you’re not a beginner and are not sure if you want to invest the money before you start seeing potential gaps in your knowledge being filled in, just send our support an email at [email protected] and ask for an extended free trial.

Is there a “Skip Phase” button?

Not right now, no.

But in general, I would say that anyone N2 or under would find value in Phase One.

Anyone at N1 and above could potentially start in Phase Two... but having gone through Phase One after passing N1 myself, I'd still recommend just going through Phase One fast to fill in gaps in knowledge.

Just make use of the archive button on stuff you're familiar with so you can go through everything fast.

Skimming past content you already know

Don't worry, we're not going to ask you to re-learn hiragana and katakana two years after you first learned them ^^

There is a button to skip kana learning right when they're first introduced.

What about all of the other content I know?

You can just read (and/or skim) through lessons.

New sentences will get added to your flashcard reviews, but there is an option to archive flashcards you don't need to study. You can also uncheck the toggle at the bottom of lessons to not add sentence cards to your decks.

Following this approach, you should be able to:

Get reminders of things you've learned and learn how it's used in everyday Japanese
Catch the things you haven't learned yet / have forgotten
Remove items you have no problem remembering while getting plenty of exposure to natural audio, which can be difficult to understand if you're not used to it

Getting organized

Jumping from learning material to learning material can be exhausting.

A major reason we wanted to build NativShark in the first place is that it's too much work to constantly keep track of how you should be spending your precious study time, which resources you should use, if the resources you're using will take you where you want to go, etc.

That's why we made this button: