NativShark March Review
Welcome to our end-of-the-month March update!
In light of the state of the world, we hope you’re all doing well, staying in and staying safe!
We’ve been doing our best every day here at NativShark and are excited to share our progress with you.
That being said, we have definitely had more than a handful of challenges in March. Three of our team members, Niko, Caleb, and Chie, were sick with what may very well have been COVID19. No worries, they are all better now thankfully! Though they were completely unable to work for the better part of two weeks.
That was only one of the many challenges that we were dealing with in March. They piled up in a way that, unfortunately, will require us to have to delay the Phase One launch until April.
Our new planned launch date for Phase One is between April 20th and April 27th.
In this update, we’ll break down everything that led to this decision, including the problems we ran into in March, and how we’re solving them.
Management considerations
About the team
As mentioned above, three of our team members were sick with what was most likely COVID19. We can’t say for sure because they were unable to get a test for it, but the symptoms matched up, including the very high fevers, difficulty breathing, dry cough, and intense body-ache.
Again, everyone is better now so we are very thankful for that. Don’t worry too much about us! But please hear us when we say you don’t want to catch this thing! It’s nasty.
We do have good news though, in March we brought on two new developers to the team!
Femi joins the team as a fullstack developer, and Manuel joins as a back-end developer. We’re very glad to have them as our newest team members! While we do need to take time to get them up to speed, this will make development much faster in the long term.
Check out our updated team page, and come make them feel welcome by saying hi in our Discord!
And trust us when we say, especially with everyone in lock-down, we wanted just as badly as each of you for this update to come out in March. There’s a balance to be struck between pushing the team really hard and staying healthy while avoiding burn out.
We’re now at a really good team size, but the tasks in front of us are still quite large. That being said, I’m really happy with the way we’ve started coming together as a team and solving these problems!
More on that…
Project management
Our team is global and spans across 6 countries so far. We love having a diverse team, but being all around the world across all these time zones meant that team coordination was almost impossible if everyone started at, say, 9 a.m. their local time.
To solve this, some people on certain teams are getting started on their work very early (around 6 a.m.), while others are starting considerably later (perhaps around 12 or 1 p.m.) in order to get even just a few hours of crossover with the most team members per day.
At first it was a struggle to figure out how to get the schedules and time zones to line up, but now it’s working pretty well and development is happening 24 hours a day now because our time zone groups make perfect thirds across the globe.
Seriously, everyone is 8 hours apart from someone. We’re in GMT — 7, GMT + 1 and GMT + 9.
In addition to that, we’ve also started using a virtual office to help ensure the team has good communication, as sometimes it was difficult to get a hold of someone we would need, which could result in a person standing by waiting for an answer in order to proceed with their work.
Basically, what the virtual office entails is all of us hopping on our webcams and working in a call together, unmuting our mics as necessary so that we’re available and accessible to collaborate as needed.
Along with being a better way to communicate, it’s a lot more fun to have everyone around too. It really helps us push each other, and builds a great sense of community for our remote team. There’s a lot of strategies out there for running a fully remote company like ours, but this works for us :)
Our collaboration and project management system is a combination of Discord (for voice and async communication [we think slack is boring!]), Whereby (for video / virtual office), and Monday.com (for the actual project management).
Another project challenge we’ve had to overcome that has been taking a lot of our development time is the content management system side of NativShark.
In other words, the thing that lets our content creators publish content for you! It’s a huge system and task to build in and of itself, and it has to function at least at a base level before Phase One content can be published. This is perhaps not immediately obvious from a student’s perspective, but rest assured the tools that have been built to build the lessons are equally as exciting as the student-facing parts of the site! Jacob talks a bit more about this in the Development considerations section below.
Lastly, we’ve put together a public-facing feature development and issue tracker board that you can find here. This board is updated bi-weekly!
Looking forward to April
As mentioned above, the launch date has been postponed to April. We’re aiming for the 20th to the 27th, and we’ll keep you up to date with any news regarding this. Keep an eye on this blog and the public development board linked above.
With the launch, we’ll put out some videos explaining how to use the tools you’ll find at NativShark and what they can do for you. We’ll also have written guides on how to use them, as well as some stuff on the NativShark methodology, why lessons are laid out the way they are, and how integrated the whole system is. Nothing lives in isolation any more thus making your studies more realistic and holistic.
In addition, we’re doing some house-keeping and reorganization of the Extra Credit lessons so we can have them in a spot that makes more sense than where they are currently.
You can expect the items on the roadmap page to be adjusted soon.
In March, like much of the world, the team has been in self-quarantine to stay safe from COVID19, even if three of us caught it, we’ve isolated to not spread it and have instructed our fellow teammates to be extra safe. This thing is no joke. We’ll continue with social distancing into April and follow the guidelines of the WHO. We are fortunate that our work can still be accomplished while remote from home!
We hope that you all stay safe and, if in quarantine, are passing your time without going too stir-crazy. We’ll do our best to get all our Phase One content out as soon as we can while also remaining healthy! We’ve got to keep vigilant against burnout as well :)
~ Caleb
Development considerations
As mentioned previously, our development team has grown by two in the last month, bringing it to 5 members total. We do not anticipate needing to expand this number much more beyond this (if at all) for the foreseeable future. Although the additional developers will without a doubt allow us to bring higher-quality services to everyone, there is a little bit of time required to bring them up to speed in the system, which caused maybe about a week delay in total. Speaking of the system…
Admin panel and tools
Most of our efforts have been focused on building the admin panel and content creation tools required by the content team so they can easily create, format, and check every lesson, vocabulary card, kanji card, and path to make sure they are perfect before being released. We are very excited about the power of these tools and will likely show them off on their own at some point in the future (they’re quite rad).
One of the largest challenges was trying to reduce the amount of “repeat work” that was being done. If a word like 食べる (たべる) has already had the literal “to eat” associated with it, the editor shouldn’t have to re-write that literal the next time it’s used. Even beyond that, the system should allow as few typos as possible when it can. As a solution to this use case (and many more), we wrote a system which can systematically break down a Japanese sentence and associate it with all data that we’ve previously added to our database to allow our sentence writers and editors to focus on what’s most important — the new word or point being taught.
That was a lot to discuss and that’s just for sentences. We’ve also built a robust lesson editor that will enforce our new formatting standards across the entire site, ensuring that information is presented to you in a consistent manner. The lesson editor lets a writer quickly create the different elements you see in our lessons with keyboard shortcuts and commands. This didn’t exist anywhere online, so we’ve had to write these tools ourselves!
We’ve been working on adding in the content creation “flows” so to speak. There’s a built-in checks and balances system that uses a series of dashboards to keep track of what state a lesson is in, “draft” → “in progress” → “check for edits” → “in review” → “published.” The system enforces this so that the person who wrote the lesson can’t have the lesson published without multiple sets of eyes seeing the lesson. This is intended to improve our quality control and publishing consistency. So, you can really give us a hard time when you find typos! Haha.
The other parts
In addition to the admin panel, we are also making adjustments to the rest of the system based on external feedback and internal testing. We’ll detail these more in the updates that follow but it’s important to note that we are always listening.
Due to the need to create the admin panel to unblock our content creation pipeline, the user-facing side of the website has seen a reduction in activity (bugfixes, general updates) that will be remedied as soon as possible. This project is quite the undertaking, and we’ve had to come together as a group to solve a lot of unique challenges that have come up. Building stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the same way.
We hope you look forward to learning Japanese in a way that has never been presented before! We appreciate your patience, and the wait will be over soon.
~ Jacob
Content considerations
We have a lot of content on the way.
As we mentioned in our February update, Phase One has more than 160 lessons and about 2,500 sentences, 900 vocab flashcards, and 750 kanji.
You’ll learn about Japanese and how it works: the particles and what they are, how parts of speech work in Japanese, the three different verb types, i- vs. na-adjectives, and all kinds of verb conjugations. You’ll also learn to understand natural Japanese dialogue, be able to give a solid self-introduction on your own, and even carry on decent conversations in casual Japanese with friends.
(We teach both casual and formal Japanese in Phase One, with a slight tendency toward more casual language, as it tends to be better suited for teaching the fundamentals of the language.)
To put that into perspective, that’s more Japanese content than the first two years of your average university program.
What’s more than that, all of our sentences only introduce a single new word at a time. This means everything is constantly building upon itself, and you won’t be burning your time trying to figure out what the words in your target sentence mean, let alone the grammar being taught.
Our flashcard system will also be there to help you along your journey through all of this content. When you complete a lesson, the cards relevant to that lesson will automatically be added to your decks to be reviewed. This helps ensure that you truly are only getting one new word per sentence, and assists in keeping your journey through NativShark smooth and streamlined.
Sadly, however, we have faced delays with getting all of this content out. Besides from me being sick and taken out from writing the lessons during that time period, Ty has had some obstacles that came up which prevented him from editing and arranging said lessons.
In March, Ty spent a large portion of his time manually breaking down every single kanji we’ll be teaching into the parts that are most effective in helping you remember them, along with writing base mnemonics for the same purpose. While most of the leg work is done, he is currently editing through it all to catch any inconsistencies or errors. At the time this post goes up, he’ll be starting to wrap up with that process.
As with the other tools and systems of NativShark, the kanji system will be very closely tied to everything else as a whole. We’ll be teaching the kanji with vocab introduced alongside lessons instead of going through everything all at once. Having this system so highly integrated with the others will vastly improve your ability to remember it, in addition to all the other steps we have taken to make sure everything sticks.
A fun way to get a better picture of the depth of content taught in Phase One is to look at some of the dialogues we introduce. With the NativShark system, each day is topped off with a natural dialogue so that you can see how Japanese people use the words and phrases you’re studying. Dialogues never contain new words or grammar — so in a way, they’re for reviewing — but they do contain new situations in which the language we’ve learned pops up.
Long story short, before you’re finished with Phase One, it will feel effortless to listen to or read conversations like the following, including the hard-to-translate nuances.
There will be formal dialogues, too, but you’ll just have to look forward to getting them with the Phase One release!
~ Niko
We’re sorry that this blog post brought the unfortunate news about the delay. But just like studying Japanese, getting this system out is a journey, and we’re going to keep swimming. We look forward to getting everything out to you as soon as we can.
We’ve said this plenty before, but the entire team can’t wait to start using this themselves, too.
Lastly, we’ll leave you with this beautiful NativShark, “if Tokyo was underwater” inspired art piece by Chie which you can purchase a print of if you’d like at our merch store!
Thanks for reading and stay safe out there,
~ The NativShark Team
