Yeah, you could try turning it into a ‘test simulation’ deck if you want. Recalling the kanji is probably what’s more important for Kanken anyway. However, I’d just like to suggest you also spend time on finding out (when possible) why some 四字熟語 mean what they do. It’s more time-consuming to learn that way in the beginning, but you’ll probably need fewer review sessions to retain the compound afterwards, so I think it’s worth it.
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I do search around for more meaningful info when the 4 characters are haphazard. I have the 四字熟語 dictionary published by the kanken org. A lot of times it states the meaning of a kanji if it doesn’t seem obvious in the overall context. I also have the kanji dictionary on ios which also has many of the idioms.
For the cards, I’m debating whether to just generate new test simulation cards or turn the existing cards into them. I’m a bit torn. If I create new cards, I have to go through all the words again, 15 new a day. It also doubles my studying time since I have to master the current cards with the kanji on front. I think I may just change the current cards.
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I mean, it’s just effectively flipping the cards, no? (I don’t know how that works in Anki or whatever software you’re using though.)
How do you learn vocabulary if you don’t use Anki?
Initial exposure, reading the dictionary and thinking about the definition until I feel like I understand it, then reading example sentences so I know how to use the word. After that I rely on repeated exposure. If I absolutely want to remember a word or if it just seems to trigger a memory of something else, I create a slightly more elaborate mnemonic (mostly very visual/sensory/emotional, and with as few clever words as possible) and put a lot of effort into visualising or reliving it. Then it sticks. Some examples:
https://community.wanikani.com/t/non-wk-mnemonics/49513?u=jonapedia
I haven’t actually used all of them to learn something myself (most of them are for other people to use and perhaps get some ideas from my approach), but if you want specific examples of relatively complex-looking things on that thread that I actually learnt… here:
In both cases, I either put so much effort into creating the mnemonic, or it was so intuitive and vivid because the elements were familiar (the second mnemonic popped into my head within 30 seconds of being given the word by someone else) that I only needed to go through the entire mnemonic once. Almost no revision. Another simpler example is this:
The kanji mnemonic bit is nonsense for me (I made it up, but I don’t need it and have never used it), but I really did remember ‘licking’. I looked the word up once in a dictionary, immediately thought of なめる because of the sound, and then dropped it. I came across it about three months later and couldn’t recognise it, but something in my head said, ‘It’s… なめらか, right?’ I checked the dictionary, and it turned out I was right.
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Thank you that’s very interesting.
I had a look at your mnemonics once before,
but for me it was a bit difficult to follow the stories but I will try to understand it better.
Maybe it is a bit different for you to memorize Kanji because you have experience with Chinese characters already.
For me, the WK stories works very well at the moment because they include all the components separately.
That makes the story long sometimes but it helps me to write the Kanji later on, so I don’t mind that.
If I would be able to restore my visual memory more easily (that is quite good in my case when it comes to recognize a Kanji) when it comes to writing I would agree that your stories are easier to memorize and stick better.
I think you are right that Anki (or something the like) is something like a crutch that you need only if you are not able to create a strong connection in your mind in the initial learning effort.
In a way I am aware that it is a crutch but I am using it happily until I am able to create better mnemonics.
I made some for Kanjis outside of WK and they stick so well that I don’t need to review them at all and are able to write them right away.
That’s a massive amount of time saved compared to repeating memorizing and writing over and over again.
Anyway, it seems eg in the stone age humans had to memorize a lot obviously because there was no way of writing down knowledge and it was a matter of surviving to memorize everything.
I think humans have that capability still but currently we are not making good use of it and are becoming more and more lazy and dependent because of technology.
Btw. are you planning to take the Kanken test?
What do you think about it?
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In Anki I can create another set of cards based on the same data. But you start learning them from scratch. If I edit the current cards, the memorization details stay unchanged. So it may be a long time until cards I felt were easy for kanji recognition would show up. But if I am particularly bad at memorizing from the kana, I may be just failing like 70% of the current cards after modifying them anyway. Creating new cards though would probably increase my time with anki since you have twice as many cards to go through (two per idiom, one with kanji and one with kana plus meaning).
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I am not sure if you spent two months just learning the 四字熟語, but anyway maybe it is worth to calculate how much percentage of the overall score you can make in this section and distributing the overall studying time according to the percentages of all the sections of the test.
The 四字熟語 are the most difficult to learn in my impression but they are not making up a lot of the test scores.
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I might take it at some point if I need to assure someone of my kanji proficiency, but I probably won’t bother too much about it for now. I have no idea what level I would be able to pass now… maybe 二級. I’ve looked at 準一級 and 一級 and I know I can’t pass either, though 準一級 feels significantly more doable than 一級. I’d need to study in order to take either though. For now though, I’ll probably just acquire 一級 kanji knowledge for fun only and keep it in my head just in case I decide to take the test. (For example, thanks to Twitter recommendations, I learnt 戮力 and 勠力, which appear in compounds like 戮力協心 and 同心戮力. The first is more common in Japanese, but the second version is probably considered more correct in modern Chinese.)
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It is only a fraction of my study time. I am also redoing my writing practice (the hane issues, etc.). And I still have to study 部首. I don’t think I have much leeway if I get many wrong in these sections. I think the 四字熟語 takes up a good chunk of points for just a few questions.
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I am a bit surprised how important they are treated. Of course some of them express some important wisdom, but I found a lot of them are direct translations from Western proverbs and many just seems to be very random. In my impression it is the most meaningful and common used that tend to appear in the actual test.
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@Jonapedia basically has photosynthetic memory: a bit of sunlight goes a long way. The rest of us mortals have to drill vocab on Kitsun.
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Of course Jonapedia is special
.
But I am currently reading a lot about memory and contemporary science and I am more and more suspicious about the current dogma of materialistic science that the brain and memory works like a computer.
I might be wrong, but according to my new beliefs everyone could be better at learning Kanji if you are willing to overcome that dogma.
Now I am trying to prove that by learning a lot of Kanjis. Maybe it takes some months to see a result.
And to be honest I am not yet sure how to do it, but to follow Jonapedia’s logic seems promising.
That means basically rather than cramming Kanji I am trying to tune in to the morphogenetic field of Japanese (which is connected to Chinese) 
“But the big implication of this approach is that memory is transpersonal.”
Anyway, thank you @Jonapedia for sharing so much of your way of learning and thinking!
It is very helpful to make studying easier!
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I wouldn’t be studying them if they weren’t on the test. It’s just one of the many decks I go through each day. But my other Anki decks are mature. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to start going through another one for 部首. I am assuming that kanji from any kanken level can appear on the 2 級 部首 section. The bulk of my time is now practicing handwriting. It is so big a difference to write neatly on paper than on on a computer text recognizer. I learned on a computer text recognizer and as long as the stroke direction is fairly correct, it’ll recognize the kanji. On paper you need the relative stroke sizes to be right and the hane endings, etc…
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Words of courage form a ten year old boy who passed the １級：
「将来は漢字博士になって、外国の人たちにも漢字の魅力を伝えたい」と夢を語った。
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While that is technically correct, truth is 部首 are obvious at first sight for most kanji as long as you know what 部首 exist. So the exams don’t really ask them at random, but usually the tricky or non-obvious ones.
I understand going for more than level 2 Kanji in case you’ve never studied 部首 before, but honestly I think getting a 過去問集 by frequency for 準2 should be more than enough. 3級 if you want to play it extra safe, but it’s already an overkill that feels like you could be spending that time on actual 2級 content.
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They are actually asking about three tricky ones out of ten in the 4級.
That seems to be quite consistent looking at previous tests and the Kanken Nintendo game.
The problem is, knowing that you could mess up more because you might think the easy ones are actually tricky.
But this also means, that by treating all of them as easy and not studying anything you get more than 60 percent right.
A good way I think is to memorize only the tricky ones, like eg 鬼 is 鬼 in 4級.
Maybe that ratio changes in the upper levels, but I found that in general Japanese exams are pretty predictable and fair and it is worth to analyze if there are tricky questions and to know about the ratio of tricky to straightforward.
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You were asking about 部首 names. I think this might help:
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Definitely. And even among them, 漢検 is one of the most predictable ones available.
What I meant is that even for your example, even if 鬼 won’t appear at a Kanji teaching book divided by level (such as the official ステップ series), it will surely appear at a frequency 問題集 for 準2級 or 2級
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Got home to find out detailed results had arrived. CBT always so fast.
So the 155 points passing mark is definitely a thing, two times in a row, huh?
Also, very surprised with the amount of perfect sections, I wouldn’t get those even in 3級 and 準2級. I’m pretty sure it was the first time 書き取り wasn’t my weakest section. It actually even has 80%, the official passing mark (!!!)
Having 四字熟語 意味 as the weakest sections does make me feel a bit dirty, though lol
All in all, the score was a lot higher than I was expecting, hooray. (still not taking 準1 anytime soon)
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