掲示板 Forums - Schedules are too hard (Genki 1)

I know this wouldn’t really be answering your question, but have you used anything other than the textbook for learning? I started off with Genki 1 just because the book was on sale, but found it to be a bit inconvenient at times, so I decided to just stick with other random resources.

Channels on YouTube like ゲーム言語 (GameGengo) and TokiniAndy have amazing videos that go over things like grammar and textbooks. TokiniAndy in particular goes over Genki in detail.

(Also, the grammar isn’t necessarily that complicated. だ is just a casual form of です, ね is a particle that goes at the very end of a sentence and shifts the tone of the sentence to something like what “, right?” would do, and は is just the は particle. It’s all about knowing which goes where.)

All of the grammar questions are specially written for Renshuu, with the order of the Renshuu grammar curriculum in mind. If you follow Renshuu's pre-made schedule packs, everything is built off of previous lessons and you will never get questions using grammar or vocab you don't know.

But because the lessons were written to be taken in a specific order, when you're learning from a textbook or something that uses a different order, you'll end up being shown grammar questions that use terms you haven't learned yet. There's no way around this, because Renshuu doesn't have the resources to be able to rewrite its grammar questions to fit every possible learning path.

If this is frustrating to you, you can either add the Renshuu-suggested Japanese Basics schedules (which use Renshuu's intended order) from Manage Your Schedules and learn with that alongside Genki, or just ignore the grammar schedules in Renshuu for a while and rely on your textbook and lessons to practice it instead of using SRS. SRS is not actually very well suited to grammar study until you're around an intermediate level anyway, because it only helps with memorization; straight memorization works great for learning words and kanji and higher-level grammar (which is mostly like learning new words anyway), but foundational grammar requires a lot of retraining your brain to understand sentences in a new way, which SRS alone can't do. Don't feel forced to use any part of Renshuu that doesn't work for you; it's all about choosing your own path and study style.

You can make up your own sentences if you want. There are lots of places in Renshuu to practice that, first on the pages for individual grammar points, and also the Word Gardens and Question Corner in the Community menu.

Repeated exposure is more important for internalizing sentence structure and grammar rules than using it yourself IMO. When I was starting out, I just spent all my time steeping in every beginner resource I could find, getting the same information from multiple perspectives and the same structures reinforced with multiple variations, until I'd wrapped my head around it and the foundations all felt logical and natural. If spending a lot of time repeating similar lessons doesn't appeal, you can also seek out graded content for learners, like the Tadoku readers, which are designed to expose you to comprehensible language at your level.