Hello everyone!
Development updates have been quiet for a little bit as we've been hard at work on two primary things:
Encountering new material is now taught to you in a mini-quiz format. First, you're shown the material, given an explanation to help absorb it, and finally quizzed on if you feel you've got the gist of it. This is not an SRS or a flashcard, it's to help you learn material on first time viewing. Though, the kanji and vocab will show up as flashcards the next day as they usually would and then enter the flashcard flow. The goal is that with the addition of this learning quiz, you feel more confident on how well you know a given material once it shows up in your flashcards, and thus help you get through the reviews.
This update is the largest feature update we've put out since launch! Building this in has set the groundwork for even more great updates to come. For example, being able to as a reinforcement activity, run this learning quizzes on specific content you'd like to run them on at any time, not just when it's first shown to you. We're also working on a version of this for helping with grammar comprehension and production.
There's also a lot of other bug fixes bundled into this patch so let's get into the notes.
Flashcards
General
Navigation
The long-awaited Streak Saver has finally, officially arrived to NativShark. We had some temporary things running in the background working to this point but didn't announce it as we were not confident in those solutions. We're quite happy with what we've landed on now, so let's discuss how it works.
What is a streak?Your streak keeps track of how many days you've completed your reviews in a row. Keep in mind this does not mean doing new content but only reviewing the cards that the system wants you to do.
What does Streak Saver do?Upon maintaining your streak for two consecutive days, you will unlock the Streak Saver. This is indicated under your streak on your dashboard.
If you do not complete your reviews for the day, the following day you will see a message saying "Streak Saved" under your streak. Note that your streak will not increase - it will stay the same.
If you do not complete your reviews when your streak was saved, you will have one more day to do your reviews in order to keep your streak. At this point, you will see the message changed to "Streak At Risk". This means that you must do all of your reviews during this day or your streak will disappear.
We settled on a 48-hour grace period after internal discussion with the team and feedback from our testers. We are open to more discussion around this, so please let us know your thoughts.
If you have any questions about how this works, we welcome you to come chat with us in our Discord community.
Note: Streak Saver can be disabled in your settings if you decide you want to go without it.
In addition to the streak saver, we're also releasing our other long-awaited feature: the overhauled learning experience. The goal with this was two-fold:
How do I access the new learning experience?You do not have to do anything special on your end. By working through your normal flow, you will find that you enter the new learning experience for kanji and vocabulary automatically.
If you are doing custom flashcards, you will notice a message once you've finished reviewing that says whether or not you have flashcards to review. By clicking on the presented link, you'll be taken to the learning experience for your custom flashcards.
How does it work?The learning experience is split up into two phases: learning and reviewing.
The learning phase for kanji and custom flashcards shows you all of the information up front so that you may familiarize yourself with all of the information available. The learning phase for vocabulary is slightly different in that it blurs most of the information first until you click "Play" or hit "Spacebar", at which point the information unblurs. We did this to encourage users to try and think of the meaning of a word when they first see it based on the kanji that it uses or their previous knowledge.
The review phase is the same across all card types and you will be shown the material in a random order with limited information on one side and the full information on the opposite side. This phase respects all of your audio settings that you have for your flashcards.
The NavigationOur goal with the navigation was to make it clear to the student where they were and what their learning progress was at all times.During the learning phase, you see the full items in the navigation that are colored based on their current status:
Also note that you can hover over these to get more information at a glance.
During the reviewing phase, this view simplifies to merely show the student the current status of the reviews, but to not spoil or give away any answers:
Note that we use colors here as well:
This was a pretty big update and has a lot of things going on under the hood that will help us release more stable features moving forward and that we can use to bring stability to areas of the platform that we are still not satisfied with (looking at you shadow loops).
Please give us any and all feedback either on our Discord community or, if it's a bug, report it at our feedback site.
Thank you as always for your ongoing support and choosing to study with NativShark. This is the start of a lot of great changes that many people have been waiting for.
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