October 2024

Time for the October 2024 update~

As a quick summary, we...

- released a Starter Guide video series
- released 16 new Units
- released 1 new Japanese with Niko video
- added 2 new Progression badges
- added 1 new help article to the support site
- added 1 newsletter to the archive
- made various content updates and fixes

Onto the details

NativShark Starter Guide

We released a video series on getting started with your Japanese studies & NativShark!

Hope you find them helpful:

NativShark Starter Guide (YouTube)

New Units

We released 16 new Units in October.

They include...

16 new lessons
66 new lesson sentences
199 new vocab sentences
16 new Dialogues

These new Units also come with two Progression Badges.

Unit 301
Language Settings
Maybe it's time to switch your phone to Japanese.

Unit 308
Par for the Course
You know plenty of ways to say that something is "standard" or "average".

Japanese with Niko

We released one new Japanese with Niko video this month! This one might hit close to home for a few of us ^^;

Lost All Motivation to Study Japanese

New help articles

We released one new help article to the support site!

The topic of how to practice speaking has come up a lot recently and I (Ty) kept feeling like we didn't have something that fully addressed the questions and confusions I was seeing pop up.

So now it exists!

Practicing and improving speaking

Now that the above exists, we also edited a few sections in the various guides to reference it and updated a bit of the speaking section in the Essentials Guide while we were at it too ^^

Newsletter Archive

We only were able to get one newsletter archived this month as we were busy working on the Starter guide videos. Still, hope you enjoy this one:

Japanese shrine maidens: what do they do?

Changes to the study site

Removed the Discord banner on the (logged-in) My Journey page when your NativShark account is linked to your Discord account

We've also seen a few more formatting bugs involving kanji with furigana in notes and other areas of the site. Those are currently being examined to see if we can push out an intermediate fix until the larger system update can fully address these. Thank you for both your reports & bearing with us!