yudantaiteki Wrote:The only potential problem is that the words are often chosen because they're uncommon or unusual, so that they will trip the native speakers up.

Naruhodo!

I got the level 5 and level 6 books a few years ago and I was utterly discouraged by them. I think it's good that they knocked into me the idea that at an advanced level, it's not kanji but vocabulary that are the problem; but I might not have been so discouraged if I had realized that!

not knowing vocab can be a really big killer to your score on the KanKen. I was playing around on KanKen DS3 a bit more and passed 9kyuu (yay!) and attempted 8kyuu and got 103/150 of course needing 120 to pass. So at least I know where my level is roughly at and with a bit of work should be able to get there no sweat.

Anyone here who owns KanKen DS3 think it would be a better Idea just to take each level until you've seen every single question in it, SRS all that you get wrong? It'd be great to create something that everyone can use to prep with but I feel it's a task that may be beyond what I can do right now.

SRS all you get wrong on KanKen DS3 would be the fastest way to level up because theres no time wasted creating or sourcing info and no time wasted inputting info to create cards for stuff you already know.

In a sense, the kanken is much more a vocabulary test than a kanji test.

Here are some example sentences from the reading part of the STEP book for level 2; the bold words are the words being tested.
彼の行動は称賛に値する
ピカソの亜流に属する画家だ。
良心を欺くことはできない。
大使が国王に謁見する。

And from the writing part (the words you're supposed to write are in katakana):
コンイン届を二人で提出する。（婚姻）
エントツの掃除を手伝う。（煙突）
記者がスルドい質問をする。（鋭い）
友人とアクシュして別れる。（握手）

Theres something like 110,000 example problems in KanKen DS3. (I'm going to assume 80% is for the top 3 levels?) Anyway, the software is kind enough to show you what percentage of examples you have seen from each level aswell as (I think?) showing you what percentage are currently flagged for later review.

I decided I'm going to have my deck as mostly sentence mining and for my production, in the same deck it'll be all my wrong answers from KanKen DS3. I guess it'll work.