erlog Wrote:Congratulations, you did it faster than I did. You also got a better score. You should rest for a while.

PotbellyPig Wrote:... I have never taken the test. ...

PotbellyPig Wrote:I was just wondering if just studying for something like the Kanken is worth it in terms of effort involved versus perceivable results. I could actually take the test in the USA since it is given in a school in NJ (maybe I'd be the only adult in midst of kids). I can play that DS game for practice. My background is that I've gone through about 21k words in Anki and have read a lot of light novels. I would say my reading is N1 level but I have never taken the test. I'm still focusing on improving the reading portion with grammar not shown in N1 workbooks by finding them in actual works. I always do kanji practice with writing so I can write RTK1 Kanji and maybe 400 more. My listening ability is not good but I am starting to concentrate on it. Would Kanken practice be worthwhile whether I take the actual test or not?

erlog Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:I was just wondering if just studying for something like the Kanken is worth it in terms of effort involved versus perceivable results. I could actually take the test in the USA since it is given in a school in NJ (maybe I'd be the only adult in midst of kids). I can play that DS game for practice. My background is that I've gone through about 21k words in Anki and have read a lot of light novels. I would say my reading is N1 level but I have never taken the test. I'm still focusing on improving the reading portion with grammar not shown in N1 workbooks by finding them in actual works. I always do kanji practice with writing so I can write RTK1 Kanji and maybe 400 more. My listening ability is not good but I am starting to concentrate on it. Would Kanken practice be worthwhile whether I take the actual test or not?

I was basically in a similar position to you when I started studying for KanKen. I will admit that doing real reading practice or writing practice might have been more beneficial for overall ability.

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.

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.

rmpalpha Wrote:Reading through this thread has inspired me to get the KanKen 3 DS game and work through it. After about 14 hours in, I've completed 80% of 10級 and 18% of 9級, and am liking the game a lot so far. A bit about me - I studied Chinese for several years and switched to Japanese a couple of years ago and am at about JLPT N2 level now. I know probably most/all of the 教育 kanji plus some of the 常用 kanji due to my Chinese studies. In any case, my impressions:

PotbellyPig Wrote:By what you write, it looks like it is worth it to go through each level and not jump to the recommended level by the test they seem to give when you start out. Makes sense since you get the max exposure to all the words and all other aspects.

Sebastian Wrote:What good resources are there available to study for Kanken, for people who don't have a Nintendo DS?

rmpalpha Wrote:(2) After getting a bit bored with the 10級 questions at around 50-60% completion, I switched to the 9級 test and was surprised at how much more rigorous the 9級 felt compared to the 10級. I have 65 words for the 9級 word list already at less than 20% completion! This is great because, even though the test is not that much harder for me, I feel that a much broader range of my vocabulary is being tested and I like that. Right now, I'm doing one 10級 test (just because I want to pretty much complete it) and one or two 9級 tests per day, and reviewing any vocabulary/missed questions in My KanKen.

PotbellyPig Wrote:I'm fiddling in the game now. What exactly affects the completion rate? Do you just keep selecting new practice lessons to run through at a given level? Or do you have to take the tests to increase it?

rmpalpha Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:I'm fiddling in the game now. What exactly affects the completion rate? Do you just keep selecting new practice lessons to run through at a given level? Or do you have to take the tests to increase it?

My understanding is that percentage completion means the percentage of all questions you answer correctly in the tests, yes. So, the more tests you complete, the more new questions that you can potentially answer correctly on - and the greater your percentage completion.

However, you should always check every question you get wrong for review (so, when you get a question wrong, you can check on the lower-right corner, or, at the end of the test, you can click on 見直す and check the box at the lower-right corner for every question that you get incorrect). Once you do this, you can review the questions you got wrong in My KanKen as often as you need and, once you've done that and unchecked the questions, they will be added back to the set of new questions in each new test. If you don't check the questions you get wrong, they won't show up again until the entire corpus of questions for that level cycles back to that point - which could be quite a while. You may have read about some people getting "stuck" at high 90s percentage completion for this reason.

erlog Wrote:I posted an outline of the format of that file. That other guy seemed to get up and running pretty quickly from there. So go look for my posts over the past few pages, and you'll find a lot of good information about the file.

Also 7zip supports unpacking NDS roms. So you can just unpack it to a folder then use a hex editor to look at it. There's no reason to use CrystalTile.

mrgnwlkr Wrote:I saved the basic script that was posted earlier, and I've re-uploaded it to GitHub Gist:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/40a7472abe264884768f

I hope d3573 doesn't mind. It's in C#, but could just as easily be rewritten in Java, Python or whatever. I haven't tried to compile it, so YMMV.

rmpalpha Wrote:After about 26 hours on the KanKen DS3 game, I'm at 96% for 10級, 60% for 9級, and 4% for 8級. It's becoming very clear to me that just knowing the kanji means nothing in terms of being able to read or produce the words that require these kanji.

When I went from 10級 to 9級, I noticed that the 9級 material was tougher but not horribly so - I was able to pass the 9級 test on the second try (failed the first try by one point). The switch from 9級 to 8級, however, is a different story - I have not yet come close to passing the test after two tries and my vocab list already has 31 items on it. I have a hunch that this feeling of "What the heck? I know the kanji but have no idea what the word means or how to read it" will come up again and again from this point on.

Right now, I think I'll do a 10級 test every few days (just to be sure I'm on top of the vocab for that section), and at least one each of the 9級 and 8級 tests a day. I have a long way to go before I can master both of these latter levels - right now, I'm getting scores of 140-145/150 on the 9級 test but there are always several words that I don't know. I won't be satisfied with 9級 until I can get a perfect score! As for the 8級 test, I have a lot of work left to do as I'm getting scores of <100/150.

I am definitely enjoying the increase in my vocabulary - only time will tell to see whether I can use the words that I've learned these past few weeks. It's fun to read about the cultural vocabulary items, like 七五三, 赤飯, or 石蹴り, and about science/math words that elementary school kids would learn about like 三日月, 火星, 流れ星, 引き算, or 毛虫.

PotbellyPig Wrote:Good news. It seems that Kanken 3DS will have a download edition. I went into the Japanese eShop and it is featured at the top. It goes on sale on the 25th. I will probably buy it to check it out. I'm focusing on listening practice lately so I might not spend a lot of time with it, but I want to see if much is improved from the "DS3" version. Note that you need a Japanese 3DS in order to buy it from the eShop.