I already learnt basic and intermediate level Japanese in high school/college, so I was looking for a platform to study more advanced Japanese. I decided to start studying here because the platform seemed very helpful. However, most people tend to start at the beginner level. Do you have to start at the beginner level? Is there a benefit to starting at the beginner level? Sorry if the question seems dumb.
There’s nothing bad about starting from a pre-advanced level. You can start at any level you want. You can use the beginner level to see if you remember everything but if you’d start all over from the beginning it might take a lot of time I think. I joined Renshuu 1,5 years after I started learning Japanese so I had all the basics behind me and I do whatever I need, here on Renshuu. I hope my answer helps you.
You can study whatever you want however you want on Renshuu! There's no need at all to follow the default Beginner-Intermediate-Advanced path.
But if you're not starting from 0, it will help you to do some set-up first, so Renshuu is more aware of what you already know and will be better at presenting you with things that are more appropriate for your real level. I'd make the pre-made beginner word/kanji/grammar schedules, the schedules for the textbooks you've used in the past, or go to Community Lists and make a schedule out of one of the user-made lists of most common words -- these will give you collections of words, kanji, and grammar that you probably already know. If you're more methodical you can "Study" each schedule and on the new terms page mark each term with your level of confidence with it (you don't have to actually start the quiz and study, just keep refreshing the new terms until you've marked everything you already know). Or if you're more lazy, you can go to Advanced Search in the menu, populate it with those schedules, and simply mark all of the terms at whatever mastery level you want.
Historically renshuu was most useful for intermediate users and above, so you should feel right at home. It has been trying to serve the needs of beginners lately, because most people interested in learning Japanese have never had the opportunity to get to intermediate level, but the fundamental nature of the platform is still what it has always been.
No. Renshuu let's you start at any level you want.
Is there a benefit to starting at the beginner level?
Starting at a beginner level might help to build your confidence with both your Japanese skills (by making sure you don't have any gaps) and Renshuu as a learning tool (get comfortable with the tool while reviewing stuff you know, before adding the stress of more advanced terms).
While there are several ways to manually tell Renshuu what terms you already know, an easy, automatic, and accurate way to tell Renshuu what you know is to just get those terms consistently correct in a quiz. The SRS system will take of care of the rest (terms you consistently get correct go up in Mastery and you'll see them less often).
Are there potential downsides to starting at the beginner level ?
You might feel as though you aren't learning much, and might get bored if you only are doing terms you know. To counteract that you can have multiple schedules: some with stuff you knw, and schedules with brand new stuff.
Another potential downsides to starting at the beginning is you might initially have a large number of review terms as you whip through the terms you already know. This may cause some people stress if they are uncomfortable having a backlog of terms to review. Again, as long as you get the terms consistently correct, the SRS system will handle it, and the backlog will eventually be cleared.
