Kanken Learning Material, Sharing Corner

[anon43113135]

I made some Anki decks for the Kanken (Kanjitest) level 4.
It took quite some time to make the decks but studying itself was comparatively easy.
It is enough to go through the decks writing each of the items several times for about two months I think, of course depending on how much time you spend.
In a hope to make more people interested in taking the test I want to share my decks starting from Level 4 because that’s when I started to use Anki.

One downside for English speakers is, that the translation is currently in German. But the time necessary to exchange it with English would be a fraction of the time necessary to create a new deck I think.

There are four decks:
漢検４級＿漢字
漢検４級＿特別読み＿熟字訓＿当て字
漢検４級＿語彙
漢検４級＿四字熟語

漢検４級＿漢字
All level 4 Kanjis with an animated gif for the stroke order and the 部首 (the part of the Kanji that is used for the order in a dictionary).
漢検４級＿特別読み＿熟字訓＿当て字
Special readings most of them with an audio file.
漢検４級＿語彙
The vocabulary taken from the book 模試形式漢検４級 and the tests of the previous years it contains.
Most of them have an audio file.
漢検４級＿四字熟語
The four Kanji compound words are taken from the book 模試形式漢検４級 and the tests of the previous years it contains. They are not so many but sufficient for the test. I might add more from the 漢検 dictionary later on because they are culturally interesting.

In order to use the decks it is necessary to install the Migaku extension for Anki.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/278530045
I also use the Japanese Support extension, this allows to automatically add Furigana.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3918629684

This is the download link to the decks:

37.58 MB file on MEGA

Good luck!

Level 3 is following in about a week because the 四字熟語 is not complete yet.

[MegaZeroX]

I’m a bit confused on what would be the point of the pure kanji one since you will need to be able to write the kanji anyways, not just see them.

[anon43113135]

@MegaZeroX

I’m a bit confused on what would be the point of the pure kanji one since you will need to be able to write the kanji anyways, not just see them.

That’s a bit of a misconception about the Kanken I think.
Most of the Kanjis of the level you take don’t need to be written actually. It is important to understand the meaning of them very well, because in the higher levels, there are so many possibilities to create compound Kanjis that you couldn’t learn all of them, at least as a foreigner. Especially in the 同音 selection part it is necessary to guess sometimes.

For me, learning like this has proven to be effective:

Starting with the Kanjis meaning and mnemonics from WaniKani in order to be able to recall it.
Then writing them and learning the Bushu while doing so (that’s also a part of the Kanken, to identify the Bushu). Most of the 10 questions are easy to guess so that’s not really a big problem.

Then while writing I look a bit on all the readings that exist for the Kanji.

I don’t learn that, but just looking at it helps to get a feeling for the extend of it and it is easier to solve the questions of 送り仮名 which is more difficult.
Also here, it is almost not possible to actively learn all the Okuriganas, at least for me, but you can find it out with declining the word and see where the change happens, and if there is nothing to decline there is no Okurigana.
Eg here よむ, can be changed to よめる and よんだ so the change to Hiragana has to be after the よ= 詠む.

The stroke order is important. It is much much easier to memorize something that’s 100% defined than something ambiguous, even if it looks more complicated in the beginning to do so. Otherwise you are always a bit hesitating if you write a Kanji and maybe write it different every time.

I am not totally sure if this answers your question, but the point for me is, that there is not something as “just” writing.
Writing is an act of bringing your knowledge to paper, the more you know the easier it is to write.
Eg. the Kanji itself is made up from the Bushu and the Tsukuri part. (I ordered a book about that and will explain that better later because I don’t know so precisely yet). If you know the Bushu, you can find it in dictionary. That’s maybe useless for us because no one uses dictionaries on paper anymore these days.
BUT if you know what the Bushu is, you know what the Tsukuri is, and the Tsukuri is the reading (in most of the cases). Here the エイ part is the reading, so you don’t need to remember anything here because that’s something you already learned on WaniKani.

I forgot to mention, that I am not using these Anki decks for memorization without writing.
I use Anki as a method to randomize the contents when I am studying writing.
In the beginning I was writing from the textbook but that doesn’t work very well and takes much more time.