So far I am doing laughably bad on the quizzes in my book. Many of the words that I know in a general sense are being presented as answers to fill-in-the-blank questions. So I need to know the proper usage of say, 「方面」and ｢方向」enough to choose the right sentence to insert them. The tricky part is if the example sentence has a word or two I don't know, it becomes more of a process of elimination.
But, for what it's worth, this is useful to me. People say, "The 1kyuu is full of words nobody uses." But, these are words I use in English and am glad I am studying them so I can use them in Japanese.