I just came back after a break and feel lost. What do I do?

If you’re reading this, then it may have been a bit since you logged into NativShark.

Maybe you were busy, didn’t have the brain space, or some life event happened, but now you’re ready to continue your Japanese proficiency journey.

Welcome back! We’re glad to see you not giving up on your goals.

All of us on the NativShark team have dealt with breaks before as well, and it’s part of the journey, so no worries. I (Ty) find myself doing this pretty often with Korean and Spanish ^^;

When coming back to studying after a break, it's good to know how to deal with common pain points.

These include: review avalanches, dealing with having forgotten some (or a lot of) Japanese, and a general feeling of being lost or overwhelmed.

Don’t worry though, because these problems are thankfully easier to solve than you think, we just need the right strategy to get through them.

We almost never recommend resetting your progress and starting from 0. We’ll go over that briefly here, but in-depth information can be found in this article.

If you haven’t gotten that far into NativShark and feel that content does not currently match your level, you may find this article to be more helpful.

Step One: Fear no avalanche

When you logged into NativShark, you probably saw a large number of reviews to do. Maybe it’s in the hundreds. If you’ve gotten really far or have been away for a while, it could be more.

While this can be intimidating, we can get through this ^^

There are a few ways to deal with this. But first, let me introduce the most important tool you have to conquer this roadblock:

Spam the smiley face button on your flashcards.

Did you know it? Smiley face.
Did you barely remember it? Smiley face.
Did you not even look at the card and only listen to the audio? Smiley face.
Did you spend half a second and see nothing on the card? Smiley face.
Did you burn the okonomiyaki you just tried to make for the first time? Smiley face.
Did you forget literally everything on the card? Smiley face.

Always press the smiley face. You will see all of this Japanese again in reviews, new NativShark content, and in your exposure.

The smiley face is part of your DNA now. Always use it.

Why?:

Study strats: Wide not deep

Getting exposure to new Japanese is the most important step you can take to keep improving.

This goes hand in hand with not resetting your progress. It is almost always more valuable to see more Japanese in more contexts rather than trying to memorize something perfectly.

In other words, it’s better to be somewhat familiar with a wide variety of Japanese rather than trying to understand and memorize a small number of concepts on a deep level.

Trying to memorize anything before moving on is one of the worst things you can do for your Japanese progress.

We just need to see lots of context before we can deeply understand any given topic, and stopping our progression and overfocusing causes us to get stuck and stressed.

This means we have one goal when coming back after a break: Start learning new stuff as soon as possible and practical.

If we don’t do the above, especially if we take breaks, then we get stuck in what I like to call “The Beginner Loop”:

By picking up where we left off, we learn a wider amount of Japanese while refreshing our brains along the way. This means we break free of the loop:

More info about this can be found in this article!

By the way, once you get back into your studies, you'll be surprised with how fast everything comes back to you.

This is because of how memory works. The information is still in your brain, you just need to work on activating the connections to that information again.

And the more those connections are activated, the more other connections are activated.

The more we see, the more we remember. We aren't learning from 0, even if it feels that way at the start.

Here’s how we can quickly get back to progressing:

Option 1: Spam smiley face through your reviews

The number depends on the person, but if you have, say, 200 reviews, then it could be good to just spam the smiley face button through them and pay half attention to them as you go through.

It doesn’t matter how much you remember here. You barely even have to pay attention. I like to take 1-3 days* depending on the amount, and only listen to the audio while vaguely paying attention.

*Whenever I have an avalanche, usually I get through 100 cards in around 5 minutes. I’m serious when I say you don’t need to pay full attention, haha. That’s about 3 seconds per flashcard. In other words, that’s about enough time to play one of the audio tracks before it’s time to move on.

If you’re at a computer, then it’ll be helpful to make use of the space bar, which will hit the smiley face for you.

From there, you can hop right into doing new Units and keeping your progress up while slowly remembering the things that may have been forgotten.

Personally, I prefer this option when compared to the next one!

You might find that this method serves as a nice warmup before taking the jump into new material.

I've also received feedback from fellow learners telling me they found skimming the lesson summaries that are found on the flashcards to be helpful.
It's good to personalize this method to what works well for you, but just keep in mind that it's best to not spend too much time here.

Generally speaking, a smaller avalanche (up to 500 cards) should take 1 to 3 days to recover from, while a severe one (2,000+ cards) should not take more than a week.

*We have updates planned in the future that will prevent pileups like this. We're hoping to get them out in the summer or a bit later!

Option 2: Avalanche Recovery

If you have a large number of flashcards*, you could also take the option to use the Avalanche Recovery feature, which is a system designed to get you out of a review avalanche.

*When I say really large number, I mean probably over 1,000 or so. It depends on the person but that should give you a rough idea of what I mean. It’s often easier to just clear out a few hundred flashcards by spamming the space bar on your computer than having them in your reviews for the next X days, depending on the amount.

In short, this system will spread out your cards to be reviewed according to the current review threshold you have set. So if you have your threshold set to 25, and have 100 cards to review, then you will have 4 days of 25 reviews instead.

Now here comes the trick: set your review threshold lower than what you want to study before you use this tool.

Then, after using Avalanche recovery, you can increase your threshold so you can work on both getting through old flashcards, while still being able to progress and continue your studies.

A quick example:

If you have 1,000 cards to review when you come back, you might lower your review threshold to 30 or 40, and then use the Avalanche Recovery tool.

Once the avalanche is recovered, you might then increase your review threshold to 75 or 100 (whatever works for your schedule).

This would allow you to study some avalanched cards per day while still having the ability to continue progressing through NativShark without being overwhelmed by flashcards.

See this article for more information on how to use the Avalanche Recovery tool.

Personally speaking, I would go for option 1 here instead of option 2.

Some learners may find this works better for them, however. You should choose whichever one makes the most sense for you!

If you aren't sure, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and ask us what we might recommend for your specific situation!

Just keep in mind that the best thing to do when coming back is:

1. Be fast and lenient with your reviews
2. See more new Japanese

Any path you take with those goals in mind should get most of the legwork done!

The following might help as well:

Step Two: Take a deep breath

Take a second and remember why you’re learning Japanese, and why you found your way back to studying.

Maybe it’s for fun, family, enjoying Japanese media, moving to Japan, a vacation, or any other reason.

Those are all good reasons to study, so keep them close to you! And perhaps more importantly, think about ways that you can incorporate them into your learning so it’s even more fun for you.

For me, since I wanted to play Nintendo games in Japanese, this meant I would often spend hours just playing Pokemon, Fire Emblem, or whatever other games that I enjoyed while learning the odd piece of vocab or grammar here and there.

And while it was a lot of effort at times, it was a lot of fun too. This is important because if it’s fun, you’ll want to continue studying.

📚

See this guide for more information on native materials and how to study with them.

And if we continue studying, no matter how much or little we do every day, then we’ll be succeeding with this next step:

Step Three: Keep going

Once you follow step two and find something that is fun and you enjoy, then stick with it and just keep pressing the Study Now button on NativShark as much as you can!

I’ve always found that NativShark is the most fun (and effective) when experienced alongside a native material I’m interested in, which is explained a bit above.

Doing that is a good balance of getting a really strong core foundation for your functional Japanese ability, and you can dive a bit deeper into the specific stuff you like.

From there, you just have to keep showing up. Learning Japanese is a long journey, but all you have to worry about at any given time is taking steps toward your goal.

You'll get there in time. Just keep moving ^^