Ah, yeah, those are the official books. They’re basically all you need if you wanted to go that way. They also make more official books that are just old tests and tons of questions without much explanation or extra info.
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I got the ステープ book for level 5 which looks good but I dont see any information regarding some stuff such as 四字熟語. What other materials did you use for supplement?
I know of Kanken training 2 for the 3DS but that would requireJapanese 3DS for that right?
Im assuming some of the other official books such as 四字熟語 and 漢字辞典 would be overkill.
IIRC, a lot of level 5 yojijukugo are not idiomatic. Or, if they are, it’s an extremely small list of them, with super common stuff like 以心伝心. I remember stuff like 南極探検 or 郵便番号 on there.
But here’s a site that has yojijukugo problems to practice for level 5 kanji.
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I just passed lvl 10 my score was 146/150. WaniKani was really helpful for this and I am going to tackle level 9 soon
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I’m thinking about making a push for pre-2 for the end of the month, even though I probably am not fully ready yet. There’s really no harm in trying it and coming up a bit short anyway. I have nothing else to do at work right now.
EDIT: The test centers are all slammed at the moment, so I had to opt for April 7th. No problem, an extra week will only help.
After 44 days of a long wait, it is finally here! Now I can start preparing to 準２級
Because I was legitimately waiting and totally not using it as an excuse to procrastinate my study.
And I can forever remember how incapable of 書き取り I am, too!
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@Leebo So I’ve just spent about 40min reading the entire saga, and first off I’d like to say congratulations!
Just a few questions I had for you, apologies if you’ve answered them before but yeah 200+ posts are hard to keep track of.
- How much time do you put into cramming per day (obviously when your actively prepping for a test, not just normally)?
- How much does Wanikani help with the exam?
- What would you say are the things that somebody who is learning their Kanji initially from WK needs to work on, as in the sort of questions they ask?
- What WK level do you recommend to achieve before sitting a said level of the test (I know this may be too long/mundane so you can skip over this if you’d like)
- How far do you think you’re going to go?
Thanks for reading, and good luck on pre-two!
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Probably 4 hours or so.
I think any extra kanji reading practice you do will help on certain things. And some of those rare words people get called out for using in conversations when they shouldn’t do appear on stuff like this.
The proper radicals and their names. Things like stroke order. And just general exposure to way more words. The Kanji Kentei is not afraid to put really uncommon words on the tests.
It would depend on which level you want to do. Assuming you studied some of the other things I just mentioned, you could probably pass level 10 after getting to level 5 or something on WK. If you go to the wkstats site, you can see how many of each grade-level’s kanji you’ve learned. At level 5, I think you’ve covered like 78 of the 80 kanji that appear on level 10 of the test. Then you could ramp up the wk level to keep seeing how much each level gets you closer to covering the next grade. The tests from levels 10 to 5 correspond to Japanese elementary school grades 1 through 6.
I don’t really ever want to stop. I imagine passing level 2 is a decent goal for the end of this year. Levels pre-1 and 1 are kind of crazy, though, so it’s hard to really imagine having a timeline for them. But I want to keep working toward them, and if I ever get to a point where I can do decent on the practice tests I would give the real ones a shot.
Thanks!
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I have had it up to here with these damn Buddhist / religious terms in my pre-2 prep. I honestly am gonna be kinda pissed if any of them show up on the real test, because whenever I see one in my prep materials my mind just goes blank. They always have wacky onyomi and the only one I can remember consistently is 御利益 which is read ごりやく, not ごりえき.
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Leebo encountering weird Buddhist/religous terms during the test
Good luck! I’d be really pissed too if I spend hours a day studying and practising for it, and then have the bad luck of the draw to get those damn leeches on the test.
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Here’s one for anyone who wants to try.
Write the kanji for the word represented in katakana. The kanji are within the first 45 levels.
その神様は レイゲン あらたかであると評判だ。
Answer: 霊験
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Hi all,
I just found out this thread, and @Leebo, I also wish to take the kanken test but level 10 or 9, for a start 
I checked old exams and though I can read all the kanjis required for those levels, I guess, writing has to be learned 
Anyway, good luck
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Cool! Good luck. I made a video of me taking a practice test for Kanken level 10 if you’re interested in seeing what it’s like and following along.
https://community.wanikani.com/t/lets-play-kanken-training-2-level-10-the-easiest-level/33810
The quality is kinda bad, and I wasn’t sure how fast I should be going, but it might be interesting.
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An ALT I know here in Okinawa took it with his students (4th and 5th grade) and he passed though I’m not sure what levels they are to be honest. I don’t see why it would be a bad thing to take them though.
That’s cool! If it’s elementary school students in a school setting, it’s probably between levels 10 and 5, which are the 6 levels that correspond to the 6 grades of elementary school. Though I guess there could be some overachievers in there too.
Yeah, if someone got the opportunity to do it with other Japanese people, that would be an opportunity worth taking, even if you didn’t feel super confident about passing.
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Yeah the teachers he worked with told him just to give it a go and he passed the lowest one they were doing so they told him to do some studying and give the higher levels a go. He said the hardest part was remembering how to write them.
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Just encountered 拙僧 used as a pronoun for the first time, and now I agree with you fully. >_>
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Thank you, thread, for introducing me to a test I know I will one day be compelled to pass, struggling bitterly through 6,000 kanji and a billion readings. At least I know it will probably be nothing but an unattainable dream to achieve such mastery of a language cries in kanji
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Here’s another religious word… 行脚… Reading: あんぎゃ. </taking this out of the running for the stump Leebo video>
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Shouldn’t that sort of thing be done with JS or PHP, not an ending HTML tag? 
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