June 2025

Hey everyone, here's the June 2025 update!

As a quick summary, we...

released a major update to Shadow Loops
fixed Review Sets randomly disappearing
fixed various bugs across the site
released 13 new Phase Three Units
added 2 new Progression badges

Details! ↓

Shadow Loops Update

Shadow Loops got a big overhaul this month!

They should feel much more stable to use now, and we've opened up the ability to listen to any sentence in any Phase, regardless of your current progress through NativShark.

There are also entirely new Albums that auto-generate based on your studies, and ones for the JLPT. We also threw in 2,000 vocab sentences that we had left over from when we were first creating NativShark, some of which ended up getting used (with different audio) and some that never got released.

In total, we added 14,988 sentences to the Shadow Loops player

Additionally, you both create new Custom Albums and add sentences to them while doing reviews, lessons, and so on. This makes them a lot easier to use ^^

The pages and general UI got an update too.

The main album view:

Inside a Phase album:

Inside a custom album:

Adding a sentence to a Custom Album while studying:

Creating a new Custom Album while studying:

In short, they should be a lot easier to use and study with.

Here's the full list of the changes:

Replaced the old Shadow Loops Player with one that plays from the album page directly
Fixed lots of bugs across Shadow Loops including settings not being respected
You can now listen to Shadow Loops with your phone screen locked (we have received reports that this can be spotty depending on the device, it's being investigated and we're hoping to have a fix some time in July!)
The Shuffle button properly shuffles tracks (and does so dynamically)
UI overhaul, including making things actually look like albums ^^
Can now add and create Custom Shadow Loops Albums while studying
Added 14,988 sentences across Phase Two, Three, JLPT albums, and Extra vocab
Added auto-generating albums that pull from your personal studies
Adjusted colors and organization of existing albums

We have plans to clean up the UI to help make things more intuitive while also ironing out some bugs, but there are some infrastructure updates the devs are going to be working on next month, so those changes should come shortly after that. We hope you enjoy them!

Be sure to check out the updated Shadow Loops! Here's some info about how to use them ^^

Other dev updates

Besides the major Shadow Loops update, we also...

Removed Overlayちゃん from popping up for new accounts (we have lots of guides to help along the way, and she was getting in the way of a smooth experience. She was also causing certain accounts to bug out and get stuck. Be sure to check out the Starter's Guide text or YouTube version if you're new, or just check out the Essential's Guide to get an overview of learning Japanese)
Made improvements to the loading speed, especially in the Today's Studies section
Fixed a bug that caused the Days Studied progress bar to show incorrectly
Resolved Review Sets disappearing for some accounts
Made the white bar on top of the mobile respond to your mobile device's light mode/dark mode settings (no more white bar on dark iPhone mode, yay!)

New Units and Badges

We released 13 new Phase Three Units in June, from Units 405 to 417!

These Units are full of the usual Japanese-study goodness you're used to and include...

13 new lessons
53 new lesson sentences
162 new vocab sentences
13 new Dialogues
2 new Progression badges

Milestone 45, Unit 408
の End in Sight
You're still discovering ways to use the most common of particles.

Milestone 45, Unit 412
Art Curator
You know all about ukiyo-e.

Thanks for studying with us & checking out the monthly update!

Happy studies,
The NativShark team