Getting started with Renshuu: Your guide to effective Japanese learning

In my most recent Japanese learning update  I mentioned I had moved to using the Renshuu App as my sole study resource. It has been great and I look forward to continuing to use it for years to come. 

Just to note, the meaning of 'Renshuu' is 'practice'.

This post will aim to show you how to get started with Renshuu and some of what it can do. We could call this a Renshuu review too.

Renshuu is an SRS service for learning Japanese. SRS stands for 'spaced repetition system'. SRS presents information at varying intervals to help you learn and remember things. It works by presenting newer information more often, and over time that same information is gradually presented less often. This is a proven method for learning, and many people will be familiar with Anki flash cards, which work on the same principle. For more information on the SRS concept, check out the Wikipedia page.

Renshuu is available to use free on a browser, and via app on IOS or android. The interfaces and functions are the same between platforms.

Dashboard

When you log into Renshuu you are greeted with your Dashboard. This shows at a glance all of your 'Mastery schedules' (what Renshuu refers to as flashcard decks) along with showing how many terms you need to review today for each one. 

Renshuu has some gamified aspects to it that some may enjoy, but I have it all turned off so I can't comment on those.

Mastery Schedules

To add schedules, navigated to the top bar 'Resources > Community lists' From there you will see a list of schedules spread between 4 categories; Words, Kanji, Grammar and Sentences. There are tonnes of schedules both made by Renshuu as well as community-made lists. Selecting schedules 'made by Renshuu' is the best place to start. 

Schedules are aptly named, wether it be for a JLPT level or for common textbooks. They are also ordered quite logically, with the very basics at the top, and moving through the JLPT levels and lastly textbook related schedules.

You can click on a schedule to view its contents, and to add a schedule to your dashboard, select 'schedule all'

Where to start

My recommendations to start off (assuming you are fresh with learning Japanese) is with only the alphabets first. Just about all of the content in Renshuu requires the ability to read Kana, so hammer away at those until you are satisfied you can read the characters before you move on.

Schedules to add:

• Made by Renshuu > Words > Alphabets > Hiragana (start with only this)
• Made by Renshuu > Words > Alphabets > Hiragana inflections and compounds (then add this)
• Made by Renshuu > Words > Alphabets > Katakana (once comfortable with above, add this)
• Made by Renshuu > Words > Alphabets > Katakana inflections and compounds (and then this)

Once you are semi-comfortable with reading you can progress. I would start with some vocabulary as this will also further improve your reading, as will anything from this point on, but keep up the Kana schedules for a while. My suggestion would be to not add any more schedules beyond some vocabulary until you feel you are done with the alphabets, and then work on basic Grammar.

Schedules to add:

• Made by Renshuu > Words > Japanese basics (508 words) 
• Made by Renshuu > Grammar > Japanese basics (35 grammar terms)

How schedules work

Once you have added a schedule, go to your dashboard and hit the 'Study' button to start a quiz. You can customize the quizzes quite a bit, but I wouldn't worry about that until you are more familiar with Renshuu and know what you want to get out of it (more on that later)

Below are some examples of a quiz question for vocabulary. It hides the answers at first, of which you should try and dig into your memory to see if you can answer it. You can select to display the 4 possible answers if you need a bit more help, and when you answer it, it will confirm along with reading out the word and displaying useful information, including the pitch accent diagram and some example sentences. You can also click on the red speaker button to replay the word, and it is good practice to say them out aloud a few times to match the intonation.

If you answer incorrectly, you will get a red notice with what you incorrectly  selected, followed by the correct information detailed above. Incorrectly answered questions will be presented again at the end of the quiz for another attempt, and will keep going until you get them right.

Mastery levels

Mastery levels are the ratings for each 'term' and determine progress, including how often the term should come back into your quizzes. You will see them displayed every time you answer a quiz question. You can also view them in bulk by selecting 'view terms' on a schedule from the Dashboard.

In the shot below, I am in the 'view terms' screen which will list all terms within that schedule. For the word below in the blue box you can see the mastery ratings. The overall rating is a total score across the various question types.

On the top right you can see the 'views' function, change that to 'Tinker' and you can manually adjust terms in bulk or individually. This is very useful as you may find some terms still difficult despite having a high mastery rating, so lowering the rating will mean you can study it more, and likewise you can increase the mastery rating if you think you know it better than the rating, and wish to be quizzed on it less. You can also use Tinker to remove terms from quizzes, perhaps they are terms that you feel you don't need to learn / already know.

Quiz customization

For every mastery schedule you can customize just about every aspect. From the dashboard, select the 3 dots next to the schedule to bring up settings. I would ignore the simple options here and go straight into 'more settings'

Most of the settings that you may change will basically alter your workload. It's easy to add lots of schedules but after a while the reviews may start piling up, if you reduce the workload it may dwindle too much, so it's a case of balance and something I adjust quite regularly until I'm happy with my workload for my existing schedules. 

Things I recommend looking at changing to alter workload:

• Quiz size - how many questions per quiz
• Daily study goal - how many terms to study in a day. If you select say 100 and your quiz size is 50, you will need to do more than 1 quiz. Could be more depending on the number of study vectors (more on that shortly)
• New terms per quiz - exactly what it says. This over time changes your workload and is the one that needs the most tweaking. You may be able to handle 20 new words per day, but a few weeks in the number of reviews might start stacking up, so reduce or stop it for a while until the workload comes back down.
• Max new terms - like the above but enables you to set a limit per day or week. If you have 10 new terms per quiz but a limit of 20 per week, then the first 2 quizzes will present all 20 new terms and then no new terms for the rest of the week.
• Study vectors - these are the types of questions. Vocabulary quizzes are where you have the most options, but all other mastery schedule types have options too.

With regards to study vectors, the more you have, the more questions for the same term you will do. I recommend 4 vectors with vector handling turned on. This means you may be answering 4 questions for the same term in a single day, each from a different angle, which does help with the learning.

Of course you can play around and trial different study vectors to see what types of questions you prefer. Below are my settings for vocabulary quizzes and these work well for me.

• Kanji > Kana - Read the word in Japanese including Kanji, and select the correct Hiragana reading (helps with learning Kanji)
• Kanji > Meaning - Read the word in Japanese including Kanji, and select the meaning in English
• Meaning > Kana - Read the word in English and select the correct reading in Japanese
• Listening > Definition - Listen to the word and select the meaning in English

Progression 

Once you are up to this point I cannot provide you with recommendations. It all depends on your goals, what you enjoy and what is working for you. If you are studying a certain textbook, perhaps add schedules related to that to help you work through it in tandem. If you are aiming for JLPT, then work through the corresponding schedules for the appropriate JLPT level. If you want to learn some useful phrases before you can string sentences together yourself, then Sentence schedules are great. If you are just learning, progressing through the JLPT levels is a good path. At some point you will want to start adding Kanji schedules. Most dread learning Kanji, some enjoy it. I've found a way with Renshuu that makes it less of the former and some of the latter, see the next section.

For tracking progress, Renshuu has the 'stats' option viewable from the dashboard. The stats screen shows how you have been tracking, how many questions you have done and your accuracy over time. You can view numerically or as a graph.  I personally like the heatmap, which shows your all time study levels.

Kanji

In a Kanji Mastery schedule you can select many study vectors, including the Japanese school method which is to memorize every reading for each Kanji. Although there are some fun quiz types for this it is actually quite laborious and not what I am doing. Instead, my Kanji schedule is set with just 1 vector: Kanji's meaning. Learn a Kanji and associate a meaning with it. For example, for 金, the meaning I memorize is money. Whenever I see that Kanji, I associate it with something to do with money (though not always literally) and what this does is helps with learning words, when you see a word that you are not totally familiar with, knowing a meaning of a Kanji in that word can give you that little boost in remembering what the word is. The example I gave wasn't the best for this concept as it's quite a simple one, It just happened to be the first Kanji that popped into my head. 

The way Renshuu handles Kanji is brilliant and it goes right across the platform. When you learn a Kanji in a mastery schedule, any vocabulary that you know that contains that Kanji will drop its mastery level a bit so it comes back into your quiz reviews more often, but this time including the Kanji. As mentioned before, this works very well as you start to learn Kanji readings through vocabulary rather than in isolation. The time you may have spent learning just readings can be better spent!

But there is more! As you can see from the 'view terms' view in a Kanji schedule below, you get mnemonics and related vocabulary, as well as the readings. The readings displayed can be adjusted to suit your vocabulary level, so it will hide readings you may not need to worry about yet. I have also customized my meanings, in place of the English meanings I have selected one as a key word along with common Hiragana to go with it.

In Closing

I would like to give a shout out to Michael, the developer. As far as I'm aware, Renshuu is all done by Michael and his wife which is highly impressive. The support is fast and top notch - the few occasions I've had questions Michael has gotten back to me very quickly. 

Renshuu Pro is also worth a look at. I pay $11.99 NZD per month and you get far more questions and study vectors. Listening questions being the most useful, I can't live without them. I highly recommended you at least trial the Pro version. 

I hope you have found this post useful in some way. There is a lot to unpack with Renshuu and learning Japanese in general, and different methods work for different people. The great thing about Renshuu is you can tailor it to your needs without having to follow a rigid path, and you can change it as you need.