Your second study day

Welcome back to your second study day!

Whether you continued on with a few more Units or ended in the same place we did, great job yesterday

Let's get into some details about how to go through your second study day with NativShark.

Here's the video version of this part:

Before we get started

NativShark matches your study pace.

You can study new Japanese until you hit your Review Threshold, which is found on your “My Journey” page.

You’ll see “Tomorrow’s Reviews” set to a certain number. This number is your Review Threshold.

If the number on the left is green, then you can continue progressing and getting new Japanese into your brain. You can stop anywhere between now and until it fills up all the way:

If it’s red, that means you’re going to have more reviews to do than the threshold allows, so it’s a good idea to stop for the day so you don’t overwhelm yourself tomorrow.

As such, the system will prevent you from doing new Japanese content until your reviews are back below the set threshold.

There will also be a message saying you’ve hit your threshold:

Of course, if you have the time to consistently handle more reviews, you can adjust your threshold whenever you want to.

It's good to experiment with adjusting the Review Threshold to find what works for you best at any given time.

You'll get this screen, which lets you choose what type of pace you'd like through NativShark:

With this all in mind, when studying on any given day, you can decide to:

Take a day doing only reviews
Do a single new Unit

Do any number of new Units up until you hit the Review Threshold.

And all of these are great options depending on what your day looks like. Many students find themselves doing reviews and a single Unit or a review-only day on most days.

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You do not have to keep learning until you hit the Review Threshold.

It’s just there to help you from getting overwhelmed by a ton of reviews in a single day and to help make your average study time more consistent.

What if I have extra time and want to keep studying today?

It depends.

If you're under Milestone 6, it's fine to study more new Japanese content in NativShark, as long as you have your review threshold set you something that works for you.

If you're around Milestone 6 or later, we recommend native materials. Once you're around here, this is usually more beneficial than increasing the Review Threshold and piling up too many reviews for you to handle the next day.

Native materials will be discussed more in the next part of this guide, but, in short, find a book you’re interested in reading, a game you want to play, or a movie or anime you want to watch, and absorb some Japanese from it. You don’t have to worry about understanding everything, just getting a few words here and there is plenty.

If you want a recommendation from other students that can also be based on where you are in the system, come ask in the NativShark Community!

Time to press Study Now.

Note that while your reviews may not look the same as this guide today, you should see some number of reviews if you completed a Unit yesterday and did not archive everything.

Like yesterday, you can see a kind of forecast of what’s coming up in your studies today on the “My Journey” page.

That said, you don’t have to worry about what your reviews or forecast should look like.

NativShark is designed so that you don’t have to think about what to review or what to study — it will just show up in your stuff to do when you press the “Study Now” button.

So let’s hit it and get more Japanese in our brains:

When we do so, we’ll be greeted by lovely Overlay-chan.

She’ll give us some info about review flashcards. Follow her through this and then come back here!

Before we go too far into our reviews…

Important note

Reviews are helpful for solidifying knowledge, but they are not the end-all-be-all of Japanese learning.

At the start, it’s completely understandable to take a solid amount of time to go through reviews. But keep in mind that you should be aiming to get these completed on the faster side.

Don’t stress about perfectly memorizing every single word, kanji, grammar point, or anything else.

Trying to be perfect is more likely to lead to burnout and quitting than it is to learning.

Instead, you should be hitting the smiley face on these flashcards 99.99% of the time. The other buttons are for emergencies only.

Reviews are just that- review. Reviews are there to remind you that something exists. They are not there to quiz you and make you feel bad.

The less time you spend in reviews means more time seeing new Japanese in new contexts. More time seeing Japanese in new contexts means more learning overall.

We need a wide perspective of the entire Japanese language before we can begin to understand anything on a deep level.

Seeing more Japanese via progressing in NativShark or having fun with native materials* is always a better idea than being stuck and frustrated in reviews.

*As a quick refresher, native materials are things made for speakers of Japanese such as manga, anime, books, TV, etc. that we'll begin studying with around Milestone 6 (~Unit 90). We'll get into more of what native materials are later!

Go ahead and finish up your reviews, and we'll see you soon!

Finished?

Nice work^^

After we complete our reviews, we’ll be back on our main page.

On any given day, you could end your studies here because completing reviews is a victory. It adds to your study consistency and cements the Japanese you’ve been learning recently into your brain.

But if you’ve got time and even just a tiny bit of brain power left (you don’t always need a lot. Consistency is key!), then let's keep going^^

You probably don't need me to tell you what button to press:

Into the new Unit

In this case, the first thing we have to do is learn more kana (you can press “skip this set” if you’re familiar with it already):

The kana introduced today have some interesting ways to make new sounds, but I’ll let the lesson explain that.

Once our kana set is finished, we move on to our lesson:

This lesson covers some more survival phrases.

Give the lesson a read and then come back^^

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Some students find that they have trouble reading the kana.

While we do introduce kana in the lessons based on words we see, it can be helpful to spend some time in the kana review tool as well.

After the review tool, you can also quiz yourself on the kana in extra time if you would like to do so.

Of course, always keep in mind that it all takes time, and listening to the audio on the various sentences and examples we see will help a lot!

Finish up the lesson, click on how comfortable you feel with the lesson at the bottom of the page (remember that this is just for personal reference) and then complete the lesson.

A message from Niko

Next we'll see a message from Niko explaining how NativShark content builds upon itself.

This is one of the reasons why we stress not spending too much time in reviews.

If it's important, you'll see it again in the future!

Go ahead and hit Okay and let's keep moving~

Dialogue

After the message from Niko, we'll see our first Dialogue.

Dialogues are review and contain words that you have learned previously throughout NativShark. At the start, they'll be on the simpler side but will become more complex as you continue your learning.

Dialogues help improve listening and speaking skills. Feel free to read along as the audio plays, or close your eyes or look away to try to listen before reading. You can also repeat after each speaker and try to mimic their tone and speed of speech if you want some speaking practice.

On top of the above benefits, Dialogues also help us learn how to use words in new contexts, thanks to every Dialogue being part of a situation, which we can see at the top here.

First, you'll see the context in which this Dialogue occurs. Press the "Start" button to play the Dialogue and you'll be able to read along as it plays, or you can decide to read after if you want to drill your listening abilities:

Once the Dialogue is done playing, you can press the "Translation" button to see a natural and literal translation.

You can also choose to add this Dialogue to a Review Set:

Once you're all done with this Dialogue, click the "Next" button to complete it:

Doing so should bring us back to our "My Journey" page.

Feel free to wrap up studies here for the day, or do more new Units.

Until you reach Milestone 6 or so, doing more Units in extra study time is usually a good choice if you have the time and motivation + your Review Threshold allows for it.

That said, keep in mind that review-only days can be helpful as well every now and then when you're low on time. Even days with 5 reviews are victories. Every step counts^^

Either way, great job again today!

Let’s reconvene tomorrow with our guide on how to handle the next study days.