Your path to your Japanese study goals

March 15, 2025

Fun announcement/spoiler:

We're hoping to release a relatively big project for the Japanese with Niko YouTube channel before the end of this month!

It should be pretty cool. It's certainly not something we've done before, so we're excited to have it in your hands as soon as possible.

Since it's a pretty big project, I'm trying my best to finish up the editing so we can get it out in a timely manner. I've been nearly completely focused on it for a while now. I hope you enjoy it when it comes out!

Anyway, since a lot of my time has gone into the above project, this week's newsletter is a bit more… chill! than the normal newsletter.

Which reminds me, we've had these newsletters going out for a while at this point and have begun building up an archive of the previous ones. Here are a few of my favorite newsletters that are available to read for free:

What are those ropes at shrines for?

Why are they everywhere?

Japanese shrine maidens: what do they do?

The "ghosts" of Japan 👻

In this newsletter, I'll share a bunch of links to stuff I hope will help you along your study journey. Even if you've seen some of the things before, it doesn't hurt to reread stuff in extra downtime and get reminders to help reinforce a smooth journey to your goals ^^

Being kind to yourself

While we designed NativShark to relieve the burden of building your own comprehensive study plan so all you need to do is show up and hit Study Now, there can still be doubts along the journey. If you ask me, that's just part of being a human. But there are some mindset adjustments we can make to help alleviate those doubts.

What's probably helped me the most is avoiding treating Japanese I've seen in the past as tests.

Instead, it's just a friendly reminder. It doesn't really matter if I remembered or forgot it because that fluctuates based on so many factors, even down to how hungry or tired I am or if the context/situation is right for me to make the connection.

More info on that idea here:

There is no passing or failing when learning

Add that onto this…

The power of moving on when stuck

…and we get why we so often recommend to go easy on yourself and hit the smiley face so much during reviews:

How should I answer flashcards?

And we have a newsletter that goes a bit deeper on the potential feelings of doubt while studying if you're curious, too:

Learning Japanese: 'I must be doing this wrong'

Approaching learning

Making sure we're kind to ourselves when studying is a big step. From there, we just need a comprehensive study plan, a healthy handful of native materials, and as much consistency as practical:

Building study habits

Finding your study sanctuary

↑ I read a version of these very articles written by Niko almost 10 years ago now, and I attribute a huge amount of my current Japanese ability to them. I hope you find them as useful as I did & still do ^^

After we make sure we're showing up and pressing Study Now each day…

If you haven't started your learning journey yet, you'll need your account first! You can make one for free here:

…we just have to go out and practice our Japanese! If you're using NativShark, we generally recommend starting this at or before Milestone 6. Here's a guide all about how to approach this:

How to learn Japanese with native materials

There's also the Essentials guide, which covers a bit of everything with lots of links to more information:

Learning Japanese: The Essentials

Thanks for reading~

Even though this was a bit different from a normal newsletter, I hope you found it helpful to your studies nonetheless. Should be back to the normal newsletters soon!

That reminds me, if you have something related to Japan or Japanese that you want to know about, please reply to this email and let me know! I've researched and written a nice handful of newsletters thanks to suggestions from your replies, and I always look forward to hearing what you'd like to learn about the most ^^

Drive recorder

Sometimes, "Japanese English" lines up well with… "English English". And sometimes it doesn't. Here's an example of when it doesn't line up:

Dash cam? Nah, drive recorder.

Almost as good as "baby car" (ベビーカー // bebiikaa) for "stroller"

NativShark goodie bag

NativShark Units

2 new Units have been added to Phase Three!

New Unit releases may fluctuate a bit for the next few months due to some staffing issues. Sorry about that.

Thankfully, this probably isn't something you have to worry about unless you do a lot of Units a week and have already gone through something like 800~850 Units.

We have a total of 894 Units and still counting, after all 👀

Anyway, as always, these Units are filled with vocab in unique contexts, any relevant new kanji, and natural conversations called Dialogues at the end, all of which are designed to get you functional in Japanese as efficiently as possible.

These Units also feature the following lessons:

Phase Three, Unit 380

Saying "without doing" with Vずして

Phase Three, Unit 381

Being "in conformance with" a standard with Nにそくして

Thanks for reading all the way to the end ^^

Good luck out there and happy studies,
Ty & the NativShark Team