June 2026

Hey all, Ty here ^^

It's time for the June 2026 update

As far as content visible on the NativShark goes, in June, we...

did various content fixes (typos, clarity, etc.)

The entire team is focused on getting the 2.0 update out and into your hands, so visible content updates are mostly maintenance until we release 2.0.

Speaking of which, we're finally at a point where we can share some details about 2.0 👀

Here's an update from Niko & Caleb:

Pulling back the curtain a bit on NS 2.0

…so uh, what are you guys building anyway?

What is NS 2.0?

First off, we have to preface, we have an internal rule:

Don’t talk publicly about things that don’t exist yet.

So we won’t be discussing “stuff you’ll get”. Instead, we can give details on (1) problems we want to fix and (2) what we have done so far.

Problems with NS 1.0

Hi, Niko here.

First, sure, I do think that NativShark is arguably the best resource out there for starting at zero and building up to a seriously high level of proficiency in Japanese.

But it could be better.

Over a decade ago, I started a blog focused on how to learn Japanese. A few years after that, we started actually teaching Japanese in our own written lessons. And a few years after that, we decided to build our own proprietary Japanese-learning software (NativShark).

We essentially took the lists of things to learn. All the essentials:

vocab
kana
kanji
grammar
culture & history
language missing from most learning materials
etc.

And we just built our own versions of existing language-learning tools, combined into a single, integrated platform. So we replaced:

Anki SRS flashcards
Course-teaching software
etc.

It has been a great success. But we’ve learned a lot from the experience, and NS 2.0 is our resulting attempt to build an even better Japanese-learning system.

NS 1.0 problems we want to address:

Fix Phase One. After talking to thousands of students, we decided that the order and style in which we taught the various concepts of Japanese should be changed, especially in the early stages. This is why we’re redoing the initial 200-ish Units for NS 2.0. (Don’t worry — we don’t plan to totally mess up your learning progress ^_^.)

Fix the review system. We realized that our current SRS-flashcard system (like all SRS programs) tends to result in flashcard avalanches unless students carefully pace themselves, deciding when to do review-only days, for example. So for NS 2.0, we want students to have the option to switch to a new review system that we think should solve all of these problems (and be more effective). Or students can just stick with the SRS style they know and love.

Fix level placement and onboarding. Right now, if you’re not an absolute beginner, the only option is to rush through a large percentage of the early Units until you get to a place where you feel like you’re encountering a good amount of new concepts. While this does work, and just skipping all the Units would cause even advanced learners to miss a lot of stuff… it’s far from ideal. So we want to both give students the ability to jump forward at the start, but also not get lost by doing so.

Fix the kanji experience. I won’t give too many details here, but suffice it to say that kanji learning could be improved. In fact, I don’t think any tool or platform on planet Earth teaches kanji very well. There are many ways we believe we can get closer to an ideal kanji-learning experience.

Offer more non-core tools. After countless conversations both with each other and our students, our team has a very exciting list of tools and activities that should be offered within a Japanese-learning platform. There is so much fun and useful stuff that could be done after finishing one’s Core Studies for the day.

Track learning better. How much Japanese do you really know? How many words, characters, conjugations? How many of them are you actually reviewing when you encounter a sentence? Why does sentence A feel difficult, while sentence B does not? Why do I keep forgetting this word or kanji? Did I learn X thing before? When? If not, will I learn it? When? All of this should be tracked and knowable.

“Okay, sure, let’s fix all those problems. But how?”

Well…

The path to actually building NS 2.0 (a technical look)

Caleb here.

It all started way back in early 2021, shortly after launching, when we realized:

“NS is great and all, but what if I don’t want to do the travel lessons and just want to jump into the deeper content?”

To which we thought, “Cool, we’ll rework Phase One and break off the travel lessons into a side path. No worries.”

Except it was a lot of worries because, upon further exploration into the code and architecture decisions we had made while trying to build 1.0 the first time, we created a system for ourselves that did not, in fact, allow us to easily make such content changes.

It all boils down to lots of tech debt and architecture issues. Which we can talk about at another time, if you’d like.

Anyway, the timeline:

2021 and 2022 were about trying to solve these issues with short-term solutions while pushing quality-of-life changes that we could make to the student platform. This is where the threshold system, removing streaks, review sets, immersion tracker, and things like that came in, all the while continuing to publish new content at a decent pace.

If you were around in the Discord community during this time, you may have heard me talking about an “NS 1.5”. This culminated in the series of infra changes and fixes I finalized in the summer of 2025 while still remaining in the 1.0 codebase… but that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Anyway, sometime in mid-2023, I realized that to really solve our problems… we needed to rebuild pretty much everything (as developers love to do as their silver bullet for all problems, “just do a re-write bro”).

So I started heavily investigating this as the path we would need to take, despite trying to make it not what we would need to do. Then, in April 2024, we got hit by a pretty large DDoS attack that sent NS offline for something like 22 hours?

I was awake for all of it. I decided, yeah… a rewrite is what we needed for sure.

From mid 2024 to mid 2025, Niko and I pulled together all of our plans for the platform that we’d gathered in chats over the last several years, and I set off creating a data model that would let us do everything we have wanted to do and not get in our way. All the while improving and upgrading the infrastructure that I could in 1.0 land, which was simultaneously prepping and helping me learn what I needed to for 2.0.

Then Chie and I had our first child in late 2025. At the time, the two of us were 100% of the dev team. That stopped all new code for a few months.

Which then gets us to 2026. We have…

The data model finished
Infrastructure established
Good architecture decisions in place
Built the new content admin backend platform, which unlocks Niko and the content team to build new content and learning tools (This also unlocks the ability to make content for languages other than Japanese, since the old tech was blocking us from doing that)

And thus, we’re finally in full build mode on 2.0.

This means, I hope, that our next updates regarding NativShark 2.0 will include actual details about the experience waiting for you. Not the stuff that’s planned, but the things that are actually built (because right now it’s all of the “boring” admin content creation software that allows us to create the dynamic and flexible learning content we always wanted that needed to come first).

We’re excited to share more specifics about the actual study experience and such, and that’ll come once they’re actually built.

So yeah. We’ve been super heads down this whole year just building, building, and building. Which is why you haven’t heard much from us. We want to have something ready for you by the end of this year or early 2027.

All that said, you might be wondering:

If I subscribe to NativShark now, what will happen to my progress is it still worth it?

Yes.

One of the main things we’re working on is a seamless migration from the current system to the new one, so you’ll keep and retain your progress + get some legacy flair (badges and some achievements) that will only exist for those who studied with the 1.0 system.

Not to mention, it’s through the continued support from those who are subscribed and studying that we’re able to continue building the platform, both the tools and the content.

Cheers from Niko & Caleb, looking forward to chatting again soon with you^^

Thanks for the details

Hopefully you're looking forward to the update as much as we are. The study experience should be much smoother, and with the new system infrastructure, we should be able to respond to learners' needs much more effectively, both in content and in study tools.

Exciting ^^

Anyway, we thank you for your patience while we continue to work on this and hope you enjoy the 989 Units (years of content) available to be studied right now!

Just press the Study Now button as often as possible, and keep swimming:

You got this

By the way, if you're looking for some Japanese learning help, be sure you've checked out the guides and other resources you can find on this help site while you're here ^^

Learning Japanese: The Essentials

Passing the JLPT (multiple parts)

How to learn Japanese with native materials

Good luck with your studies, and thanks for checking out the monthly update!

Happy studies,

Ty & the NativShark team