For quite some time I`ve been thinking about this wild idea of trying to pass level 1 of the kanken. I know it involves learning a maddening amount of 6000 kanji, which for the largest part you would never ever have to be able to write in real (japanese) life, but still. Wouldn`t it be great to be able to read any japanese novel without having to come across a single kanji you havn`t seen before?

It also makes me wonder how many foreigners (excluding those from countries that use kanji) have passed level 1 up to the present. I think I`m going to call the kanken kyoukai about it next week. If I get an answer I`ll let you know!

If you have any reccommendations for study materials for 準1級 or 1級, please let me know. The books I`ve found so far only contain the on and kun readings of the upper level kanji. That means I would have to use a separate kanji dictionary to look up the meaning for every kanji! They also don`t contain any example sentences.

Lastly, as mentioned by some other people on this site there are quite some kanken titles out there for the Nintendo DS. Currently I`m using 200万人の漢検DS　とことん漢字脳.

There are foreigners who have passed level 1; some of them even claiming that this was accomplished with just little over a year of study (this was in an Amazon review of RTK, I believe: might just be hearsay). While being a native obviously gives sizable bonuses to time investment, if you look at how much more efficient our own studies with RTK are (thank you, Fabrice!), it's too much to simply say that foreigners couldn't possible beat the Kanken on its highest difficulty.

There's a thread on here that discusses DS games, if you want more information on that.

Thanks for your post Megaquerty. I fully agree that it must be possible for a foreigner to pass the level 1 test. If anybody knows anybody who already passed it please let me know.

The first thing to do seems to be to split up the ultimate and seemingly unreachable goal of passing level 1 into several smaller goals, thereby making the whole thing look and feel more doable.

By the way, the official kanken homepage contains 2 small articles of Japanese people who passed level one. The kanji learning method mentioned is simply writing a large amount of kanji again and again until they are memorized. It sounds like the RTK method could provide even the Japanese with some kanji learning relief!

Link to the kanken page concerned, which also contains comments by test takers of other levels:

http://www.kanken.or.jp/frame/voice.html

Lastly:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%82%84%E3%82%...71-9097800

This is a listmania page on http://www.amazon.co.jp made by a Japanese user, containing an overview of reccommended kanken level 1 books. The nr. 1 and nr. 7 books seem particularly interesting, judging from the reader reviews.

I called the Kanji Kentei Kyoukai today and asked whether to their knowledge any foreigner has passed the level one kanken test (it tests 6000 kanji amongst other things). They said that yes, some Koreans for instance probably have. They could however not produce any statistics or figures concerning foreigners since the application form for the Kanken does not contain a question about nationality.

I`ll look around on the net for foreigners who say they have passed the level 1 test. If any of you find some info about it please let me know. I`d very much like to ask them how they prepared for it and what kind of materials they found to be most useful.

Can't be sure yet, but I'm thinking of making level 1 one of my long-term goals. Seems entirely doable with a lot of preparation. Hoping to reach level 2 by early next year.

Have you looked at the 完全征服 books for level 1 and pre-level 1? They're probably the most authoritative you can get, though I've never seen them myself.
Kanken DS 2 is supposed to have questions for those levels, and I'd suppose it would have a significant amount. とことん漢検 already has questions for those levels, but not many.