Today's update tackles some common issues with the kana learning experience as well as normalizes audio.

Audio Normalization

Before we get into what we've adjusted in the kana learning experience, we want to highlight the fact that we've officially normalized audio across the entire site as well as trimmed silence at the start or end of files.

As a result of this, you may find that audio is either louder or quieter than you are used to it being, but all audio will have the same "loudness" which should result in less eardrum damage while trying to review your flashcards or working through new content!

This also has the added benefit of saving bandwidth for students as we were able to shrink the total size of audio across our platform by roughly 70%

Old audio size:572.4MBNew audio size:172.1MB

As this was an automatic process, please report any audio that seems strange so that we can investigate it and continue to refine the pipeline.

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Kana Learning Experience

As our student count has grown, we've started to experience an influx of support requests for students that have accidentally skipped the entirety of the kana tool. We wanted to take a minute to address how easy that was to do and make it so that the interface was more clear.

Skipping KanaWe have made the following changes to how skipping kana works:

• You can no-longer skip all of the kana at once
• Each kana section now provides a way to skip that set, this shows a confirmation modal detailing exactly which kana you will be skipping
• If you have previously completed the kana set you are viewing, you have the opportunity to redo it, which "forgets" the progress that you have had on it.

The above changes should make it much easier for students to know what they are doing and ensure that the actions they are performing result in the behavior they expect.

Replaying Kana SetsOne thing that the system supports is replaying the kana learning tool at any time, but this feature is not super well-known and it wasn't super useful before as it only allowed you to replay the entirety of a section (such as all of Hiragana, or all of Hiragana Blended Sounds). This has been adjusted so now you can click on the particular kana to replay that kana lesson specifically.

If you go to https://www.nativshark.com/learn/kana and click on "View Progress", you will be able to click on any of the circles to replay that specific kana section.

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What's Coming Next?

Next up we'll be shifting our focus to the following things:

• Fixing some issues with settings not being respected everywhere on the site (an example of this is furigana in dialogues)
• More work on how audio is handled in dialogues to fix some last issues there
• Rewrite the navigation of the site (the top bar and the side bars) to prepare for search