I don't know if this will make sense to anyone else, but for me, in order for me to make any real progress, I have to just treat language learning as just another hobby. If it’s a hobby, I do it because I want to, and sometimes that means spending 7 hours reading, and re-reading a 17 page forum thread and extracting the pertinent information.
I’ve gone ahead, and as best I am able, formatted the information I found into the following text: (some apologies for length)
What type of test is 漢検?Kanken is almost more of a test of vocabulary than kanji skills specifically.
Vocabulary is more of a barrier to understanding questions and answering correctly, than production of kanji. At each level, new and more difficult vocabulary is introduced. Though kanji of previous levels will be found on the test, the test is focused on the new Kanji, rather than a cumulative model.
AdmiralKelvinator wrote: the Kanken (especially at the 準2級 and 2級 level) is much more of a vocabulary test than a test of simple Kanji recognition
Erlog wrote: I should note that being able to write individual kanji like in RTK and being able to write real kanji vocabulary are two different skills. Kanji Kentei isn't really so much a kanji test as it is a vocabulary test that focuses on kanji words. So even though you can write individual kanji fine, that probably won't cross over much on the test. The KanKen test problems rely heavily on knowing which kanji to write based on the context of the sentence.
I almost never had trouble remembering how to write a kanji for KanKen. Most of the trouble was deciding WHICH kanji to write.
When is it reasonable to start studying for 漢検? Can I do it after RTK? Most people seem to agree that going straight from RTK1 into 漢検10級 would be very difficult. Many seemed to recommend working through Tae Kim and a Core 2K/6K/10K deck first, as well as perhaps “Kanji in Context”.
However, doing Kanken right after RTK is possible, but you may struggle with the vocabulary to the point that you don’t understand the questions.
What about after the JLPT? Most testers seemed to have passed JLPT N1-3 before working on Kanken.
Erlog wrote: KanKen is a different skill set [than JLPT] altogether. So while the level of vocabulary for JLPT [1] might be KanKen 3級 level, you'd probably have a lot of trouble trying to take that. JLPT is primarily a reading and literacy test. KanKen is a vocabulary test.
To give you an idea of how different KanKen is from JLPT1. It took me a few hours of study to finally pass the lowest level of KanKen, the one aimed at first graders, because I was unfamiliar with the kun-yomi readings for some of those basic kanji.
KanKen tests a much deeper and thorough understanding of kanji and related vocabulary than anything you would ever find on the JLPT.”
What level should I start with first? Erlog wrote: I would recommending working from the beginning for pretty much anyone. If your level really is where you think it is then you should have no trouble spending a week or so flying through some practice tests in KanKen DS3 to find where your KanKen level really is. The tests don't really overlap so much, and that can be a problem especially for people like us here on this forum that didn't learn our vocab/kanji according to Japanese grade level. I very easily could have just studied for 準2級 from the beginning, and probably passed it.
If you're just interested in the cert you can do it that way, but you might have some blind spots.
Working your way up can be a really good review. I'm not saying you have to go take 10級 in person or anything. The DS game provides practice tests for all the levels, and for the lower levels that aren't that substantial that includes every single question that could possibly ever come up on the test. So passing a few times in the game is about the same as having passed it in person.
How quickly can I prepare for each level? With concerted effort, someone should be able to advance one level between each testing period (3-4 months), until reach pre-2. Depending on Japanese ability, you may be able to progress faster.
Erlog wrote: I passed 2級! My 2.5 year KanKen adventure is over!
How does the difficult change between levels? While some people say that lower levels can be grouped into difficulties, and some say that the progression is even, all agree that at the pre-2 stage that each new test is significantly more difficult than the last.
AdmiralKelvinator wrote: Been studying the 2級 Kanken using the DS game for about 3 months now and man it is brutal. A huge leap from 準2級 even if the number of Kanji tested isn't dramatically greater. For 準2級 it seemed sufficient to know 3 or 4 common vocabulary for each character, but 2級 throws obscure variant readings; abnormal, one-shot radicals; idioms; and technical Buddhist, Kabuki and baseball (!) terminology into the mix. Plus the passing line goes from [70]% to 80% which is like adding insult to injury.
How often can I take exams? Where are they offered? How many can I take? Exams are offered at designated testing centers 3 times per year. These locations can be found by visiting the Kanken site.
Additionally, if enough students are interested in taking the test, and a procter can be found, Kanken tests can be administered anywhere in the world.
In Japan, at designated testing centers, it is possible to take the Kanken as often as once per week.
Most people say that you can sit 2 exams on one testing day, while a few people say that 3 are possible. In most cases these need to be contiguous exams (3 &4) but some centers may allow gaps.
One may retake a Kanken as many times as desired.
At what point do the tests become more trouble than they are worth? Erlog wrote:2級 takes time to prepare for, but it's definitely not at the level of "so obscure you'll never use it" like 準1級 and 1級 are. 2級 is all the general use kanji and common vocabulary. Most of it you'll see in a newspaper from time to time for sure.
What are some of the benefits of studying for Kanken? Erlog wrote: I used to not be able to write anything down without having to check my phone. I had no confidence in a lot of my kanji skill. I'm a teacher so being able to write things down for my students or other teachers is very helpful to me.
Forthem wrote: while I'd definitely agree that it's pretty brutal for non-native speakers of Japanese, I think it's a great measure to see exactly how far you actually are in your Japanese studies.
Erlog wrote: KanKen was a great way to deepen my general kanji knowledge after finishing RTK. It also improved my listening quite a lot because I became able to more quickly imagine the kanji for a word I was hearing, and then by extension become able to guess the meaning in a similar to fashion as when I see a word on a page.
Erlog wrote: I passed up to KanKen 2級, and I did find that it helped my listening skill because I'm now able to guess the kanji for a lot of kanji words I hear based on the context and then figure out their meaning.
I will admit that I mostly took it so I could improve my résumé. Japanese people are very impressed by a foreigner having it. I have absolutely no regrets about it in terms of improving ability, though. It improved my vocabulary by leaps and bounds, and I feel like I can jot down almost anything I want on a piece of paper without needing to pull out a phone to check if it's right.
Erlog wrote: I know this probably seems a bit melodramatic, but I feel really great. This level [漢検2] of the test is described as being for Japanese high school graduates, Japanese university students, and general Japanese adults. This is a big thing for me since I have always tried to measure my language progress against that of actual Japanese people instead of the skewed scale that gets offered to foreigners in Japan where being able to have even minor conversations is seen as some kind of big victory.
This really feels like something finally worthy of the respect I sometimes receive from Japanese people.
Erlog wrote: I've spent the last 2.5 years progressing rapidly by throwing Anki at KanKen. Now my kanji skills are fine. My general vocab is fine. My reading is fine.
Rmpalpha wrote: Recent gems from the 8級 practice include drama terms (配役), geographic terms (列島, 半島), scientific vocabulary (氷山, 農薬, 木の実, 化石, 球根), and artistic terms (油絵, 童話, 笛, 木炭, 写生). Overall, this has been a great experience for me and it's certainly a great way for me to expand my vocabulary!
What is a good strategy for making sure I pass the exams?A piece of advice proffered was to make sure that you score 10% above a passing grade on your practice tests, consistently. So for lower level tests, you would aim for 80%, and for higher level tests you would aim for 90%.
How have others used Anki? Erlog wrote:“It's possible to do an Anki-only method, but you need to be more diligent about how you're constructing that Anki deck. You can't just put all the questions from the Step Book into Anki. If you do that then you're going to know the majority of the material, but you won't know it solidly enough to feel comfortable when it comes to taking the actual test.
Here's my new process for entering information into Anki from the Step Books.
1. Make an Anki card asking for the radical and radical name of every kanji in that step.
2. Input the reading cards, but reverse them so that they're 書き取り cards instead of reading cards.
3. Input the rest of step questions, but ignore the 部首 questions, 訂正 questions, and questions that ask for the production of a word out of context.
4. Make sure all the example words from the step overview are represented as 書き取り flashcards, and if they're not then pull a sentence in from somewhere like ALC, Core6k, or Kanji in Context to make into a 書き取り question.
I think using the Step Books as more of a content and sentence resource is going to be more efficient.
Erlog wrote: I was going to amend some of my advice about Anki and Kanken DS 3. There's one type of problem that the game can help you with a lot better than Anki, and that's 誤字訂正.
You're not really supposed to memorize the answers to those types of problems so practicing them in the game is probably better than practicing them in Anki. When I'm entering material from the step books I just skip those problems entirely.
How could I set up my cards? Erlog wrote:The deck structure is pretty simple. My cards only really have 3 basic fields. There's question, answer, and then question type. The question types are stuff like 書き取り、類義語、対義語, 部首名と画数, etc. It just tells me what to do with the card. What comes up on the front of the card is the question type and the question. Then on the back is the question with furigana and also the answer.
I have some other fields for metadata like Level and Step. There's also the standard field for "reading" which just adds furigana to whatever's on the front of the card.
I maintain separate decks for the different step levels. It's easier to manage the reviews and track progress every day that way.
Erlog wrote: My deck is laid out like this:
Expression: (カマモト)に出向いて器を買った。
Reading: (カマモト)に 出向[でむ]いて 器[うつわ]を 買[か]った。
Answer: 窯元
Question Type: 書き取り
Level: 準2級-39
Then the cards look like this:
Front:
書き取り
(カマモト)に出向いて器を買った。
Back:
(カマモト)に 出向[でむ]いて 器[うつわ]を 買[か]った。
Answer: 窯元
I laid out the deck this way so that I can have different types of questions in the same deck, and also so I can keep track of where everything came from. That's important because if I find a mistake I can easily go back to check the book to see if I made an error.
One major thing I modified about the step books, though, is that I changed all of the sentence reading questions into 書き取り questions with the target word cloze-deleted in katakana like you see above. On occasion this can create some confusion where the example sentence doesn't have enough context, but it's only an issue I've run into with like 10 cards out of 10,000. 叔父 vs. 伯父 is a recent example. The real 書き取り questions had the proper context so you could differentiate mother's brother versus father's brother, but the reading questions didn't. So I just modified the sentences to add that context.”
What else should I do to reinforce the material, other than anki? One good suggestion would be to pair the Kanken level you’re studying for with the appropriate level of kokugo textbooks. These are books aimed at native Japanese speakers to be used in school. For example 10 級 corresponds with grade 1 of education, and so on.
Can you tell me more about some of the test sections? Erlog wrote: The 四字熟語・意味 section gives you 5 sentences that are the meanings of 5 different 四字熟語 from the 四字熟語・書き取り section, and then you have to match them together. So the answers to the previous section become your word bank to match from for this section that tests understanding meanings. It sounds real crazy and real difficult, but it's actually not. It's very easily guessable through process of elimination even for 四字熟語 you've never seen before because usually the smattering of 四字熟語 in that section are not at all similar in meaning to one another.
The 誤字訂正 questions are something that just gets better with more exposure and experience. I'm usually better at them than the average Japanese person because, as a foreigner, things that aren't how I learned them stick out to me. It's like a non-native speaker of English being able to spot spelling mistakes a bit easier because they're actually paying attention to the arrangement of letters in words rather than chunking everything together.
The 対義語・類義語 is usually not great for me, though. With other things like reading/writing you have a whole sentence to function as context. With your only context being "vaguely similar" or "vaguely opposite" it becomes real hard to locate the kanji word you need in your head. The only thing that makes that section doable is being able to use process of elimination to figure out which readings go where.
At a certain point, unless you're super super deficient in one specific section, I'm not sure how worth it is to spend more energy on that stuff unless you're not already studying. Like 30% of KanKen questions are useless trivia anyway.
Can you tell me more about the Radical portion? Tabberoth wrote: All you really need to know is what each position in a kanji is called, and what the radical is “shorthand” for. We all know what the radical in 停 is. It's person. It's in the へん position. So にんべん? Yes. After that, you just have to learn the exceptions. Add Anki to that and you can learn all of the 213 names in a week or less.
Can you tell me more about the portion where I have to identify what type a compound is? 上下 - the kanji represent opposite things
森林 - the kanji represent similiar things
漢字 - the first kanji explains the second E.g 金額 (adj+noun)
出題 - makes sense (meaning wise) when read backwards e.g 入団” (verb+object)
Does Kanken test stroke DIRECTION or just stroke ORDER? While Kanken doesn’t test stroke direction, if you use the wrong direction, it may look like a different stroke, losing you points. Mincho font can be a good way of checking stroke direction in a pinch.
Recommended Resources: All Levels Kanken 3 for DS
The step books -- 漢検 漢字学習ステップ [Bright yellow with Red title]
漢検 過去問題集 [Bright yellow with Green title]
Higher Levels漢検 漢字辞典 [Kanji Dictionary]
漢検 四字熟語辞典 [4 Character Idiom Dictionary]
カバー率測定問題集 漢検マスター準1級 [Pre 1, as a replacement for Step books]
Is the Kanken 3 for DS a useful tool? Erlog wrote:Anyone thinking about taking Kanji Kentei really should get Kanken DS3. It's basically ¥2000 to give you peace of mind that the ¥1800 you're going to spend on the test isn't going to go to waste. It's also a great way to boot strap your way up for the lower levels of the test you might not want to be spending money on.
Erlog wrote: Original DS games are always region free, and will play on any DS, DSi, or 3DS from any region.
Where can I find a list of 四字熟語 (4 character proverbs) separated by Kanken level? Unfortunately, it seems as if there is no such list. However, 漢検 四字熟語辞典 [4 Character Idiom Dictionary] does list the Kanken level of each entry.
For reference, the main thread that I am condensing can be found here:
http://forum.koohii.com/thread-4261.html The first post is back in September 2008.