掲示板 Forums - Quizes using advanced vocab and grammar. Why?

The grammar questions are all hand-written and should progress according the order they're presented in the Japanese Lessons in Renshuu. Genki may not teach the grammar points in the same order, so you may end up with content you haven't learned yet in some of the questions. If you add the Japanese Basics schedule, it will teach you all of the vocab you need for the grammar questions. There is also a setting in grammar quizzes to show you the definitions of words you don't know in the questions, so you aren't lost.

It's also possible that you set your level too high when you created your account and Renshuu is giving you material it thinks you know already. To check, you can go to Advanced Search in the menu and filter words & grammar by "I know this" and "never studied", and it will show you what Renshuu assumes you know. (You can also use Advanced Search to reset those things back to unknown.)

If you are still finding the grammar questions are way too difficult for your level, when you reach a difficult question in a quiz, click the ? button at the top of the screen and report a quiz error. This will give マイコー the information for the quiz and what is known on your account, so he can investigate why you're getting those questions and maybe make adjustments to when they appear.

For anyone not going along the renshuu-made materials path, there is definitely a chance (higher at the beginning) of the quiz contents for grammar not matching their knowledge. Everyone learns things in different orders, and because renshuu's materials are hand-made and not auto-generated, filtering out against those each user's knowledge would quickly reduce the question pool to almost zero.

Just as a side-note, renshuu has about 900 studyable grammar elements, and over 4000 questions for free users (closer to 15,000 for pro members). On average, that's about 4 questions per expression.

When you actually look into a genki textbook, or one of the jlpt textbooks, and look at how many actual questions they have for each grammar element they teach...it's not a lot, and they have almost no reusability. Instead, renshuu tries to make each sentence a bit more flexible so you can see it in different question types and get more use out of them.

But the downside in renshuu's "study however you want, in whatever order you want" is that there will never be a perfect way to line up user knowledge exactly with questions that utilize multiple elements (sentences).

No, that's fine. Getting grammar explanations from multiple sources will only help in making them stick (do "Japanese Basics" before anything else in the Renshuu set, though, or you'll run into the same problem). The lessons attached to the Renshuu schedules can all be browsed in the menu under "Japanese Lessons", if you just want to see how the material compares to Genki without adding them to your daily quizzes.

You can also just focus on the lessons themselves for now (in either Genki or Renshuu) without adding them in your grammar schedule yet. If you keep your schedule a few lessons behind where you actually are in the textbook, you'll have had some more time to internalize the points and be introduced to extra grammar/vocab that may pop up in Renshuu's grammar quizzes, so you can start those with more confidence.